T
£
THE
QLISH
EVIEW
ed by AUSTIN HARRISON
AUGUST 1918
Poetry W. B. Yeats
Gertrude Bone
Albert Buhrer
R. Watson Kerr
THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS PRIZE ESSAY
H. N. Brailsford
Soldier-Poets (iii) T. Sturge Moore
Bliss Katherine Mansfield
The Modern State, Internationalism, and War
E. Belfort Bax
A Recollection of President Wilson
The All-Highest
McCudden, the Airman V.C.
The Tragedy of Ireland
The War Office and Mr. H. A. Barker }
A Tax on Books
Colour in Salonica
Books
ANNUAL SUBSCRIPTION: 15/- ™«g J?
HALF-YEARLY „ 7/6
All rights reserved
10 GARRICK STREET, LONDON
Edith G. Reid
Edward Garnett
Mrs. Alec-Tweedie
Merlin
I Austin Harrison
L. Golding
THE WORLD.
Incorporated A.D. 1720.
ROYAL EXCHANGE ASSURANCE
FIRE LIFE, SEA, ACCIDENTS, MOTOR CAR, PLATE GLASS, BURGLARY, EMPLOYERS' LIABILITY,
LIVE STOCK, THIRD PARTY, FIDELITY GUARANTEES, ANNUITIE8.
Full Prospectus on application to the Secretary.
Head Office - - ROYAL EXCHANGE, LONDON, E.C. 3
Digitized by the Internet Archive
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THE
QLISH
EVIEW
ed by AUSTIN HARRISON
AUGUST 1918
Poetry W. B. Yeats
Gertrude Bone
Albert Buhrer
R. Watson Kerr
THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS PRIZE ESSAY
H. N. Brailsford
Soldier-Poets (iii) T. Sturge Moore
Bliss Katherine Mansfield
The Modern State, Internationalism, and War
E. Belfort Bax
A Recollection of President Wilson
The All-Highest
McCudden, the Airman V.C.
The Tragedy of Ireland
The War Office and Mr. H. A. Barker )
A Tax on Books
Colour in Salonica
Books
ANNUAL SUBSCRIPTION: 15/. ™™g J?
HALF-YEARLY „ 7/6
All rights reserved
10 GARRICK STREET, LONDON
Edith G. Reid
Edward Garnett
Mrs. Alec-Tweedie
Merlin
I Austin Harrison
L. Golding
PARTS
THE WORLD.
Incorporated A.D. 1720.
ROYAL EXCHANGE ASSURANCE
FIRE LIFE, SEA, ACCIDENTS, MOTOR CAR, PLATE GLASS, BURGLARY, EMPLOYER8' LIABILITY,
LIVE STOCK, THIRD PARTY, FIDELITY GUARANTEES, ANNUITIES.
Full Prospectus on application to the Secretary.
Head Office - - ROYAL EXCHANGE, LONDON, E.C. 3
Qu^
SIMPLE FARE
does not seem insipid if
you use Lea & Perrins'
Sauce. A few drops of
this Jamous Sauce
makes the plainest dish
appetising and enjoyable.
C^r^i
ilisFa
SY APPOINTMENT.
"BEAUTIFULLY COOL AND SWEET SMOKING"
PLAYER'S
Navy Cut Tobacco
Packed in varying degrees of strength to suit every class of smoker.
PER OZ.
Player's Gold Leaf Navy Cut - - ) Y^^Id.
Player's Medium Navy Cut - - ■
Player's " Tawny " Navy Cut
Player's "White Label" Navy Cut
PER OZ.
9V-
Also Player's Navy Cut de Luxe (a development of Player's Navy Cut)
packed in 2-oz. and 4-oz. Airtight Tins at 2/1 and 4/2 respectively.
This Tobacco is als) supplied at Dwty Free Rates for the purpose of
gratuitous distribution to wounded Soldiers and Sailors in Hospital
Terms and particulars on application to
JOHN PLAYER & SONS, Nottingham.
P732
Branch of the Imperial Tobacco Co. (of Great Britain and Ireland) Ltd.
The English Review Advertiser
' BY APPOINTMENT
Military Jewellery
THE Military Jewellery made by the
Goldsmiths k Silversmiths Company
is of finest quality, and is better value
than can be obtained elsewhere. A selec-
tion of representative badges will be
submitted for approval, if desired, at the
Company's risk, or a catalogue will be
sent post free on application.
Illustrated is the new Badge of the Royal Air Force
■in Diamonds, set in Palladium, and Enamel . . £46
The Goldsmiths and Silversmiths Company
have no branch establishments in Regent
Street, Oxford Street, or elsewhere — in
London or abroad — only one address,
112 Regent Street, London, W. i.
THE
m
MITHS & aiLVEESMlTHS
kT^T^T' UTTE^ "^ rtfaefi is incorporated
111 I |L « o The Go(dsmiths7lCaanceIS Estf/ZV.
Jewellers to H.M. The King
112 Regent Street London W. 1
^Advertisement Supplement
The fl There is nothing- more beautiful than Nature's gifts, and for count-
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necklace which is coveted by all appreciative women. The pearl
is the finished product itself— it needs no polishing or shaping like
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secured for us in all its translucent beauty which has an irresistible
appeal. All who love pearls should visit the showrooms of The
Goldsmiths and Silversmiths Company, Ltd., at 112, Regent
Street, and feast their eyes on the magnificent collection of pearls
in the showcases. Here one sees necklaces of rare beauty and
colour — for the skill of the jeweller lies in the perfect matching
in colour and size of these gems of the ocean. A fortune is repre-
sented in these pearls, and fortunate indeed are those who have
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perhaps inspired by the great Red Cross Pearl Necklace Scheme.
Our illustration clearly shows what the idea is — to string a single
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that whenever a birthday or any other gift occasion arises a
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by the lime of her marriage. But, apart from the accumulation
of pearls, there is great charm in the single gem on the platinum
chain, and if it remain alone in its glory it will always be a joy
to possess.
2
The English Review Advertiser
iti
Thrilling Episodes
such as this
would be lost to the World
were it not for the ever-
ready Waterman's Ideal, which, while
the incident is yet fresh in the
memory, commits it to paper for
the benefit of those at home.
This, in itself, is reason enough why everyone
on Active Service should be equipped with a
Wateffiaite
Ideal
Foiiif§M>eii
Specially recommended for Active
Service. No. 54 (Self-Filling). 20/- :
No. 44 (Safety). 20/-. Of Stationers
and Jewellers everywhere
L. G. Sloan, Ltd.,
The Pen Corner.
Kingsway. London. W.C. 2.
"For 2,000 Years"
This is the title of a small handbook which has recently been pub-
lished giving particulars about the Hot Springs of Bath and some
information about the various methods of treatment administered at
the Baths of Bath.
=| For 2,000 years the Bath Waters have been
g restoring heal h and strength to the sick and
g suffering. But never in its long history has
g Bath done more valuable work than during the
§§ period of the War.
g Wounded and invalided soldiers have derived
g wonderful benefit from the treatments, freely
g given by the Corporation to all ranks sent to
§§ Bath by the military authorities. This has in
,g no way interfered with the treatment of civilian
g patients, and the special baths and douches
H which help to restore r.erves worn or shattered
U by worry and anxiety are now proving par-
g ticularly useful.
= During the Summer Season Bath is particularly
enjoyable, and the Cure can be taken with the
greatest comfort and benefit.
Bright, cheerful, restful surroundings and good
music help the invalid to regain health and
provide for the pleasure and entertainment of
those who come to Bath only for rest and
change.
To many visitors the architectural beauty and
historical associations of the city appeal very
strongly, while olhers are attracted by the
delightful walks and excursions all around.
The new Booklet, " For 2,000 Years," list of
Hotels and Apartments, and all information
from JOHN HATTON, Director of Baths.
BATH.
IIIIIMIIII
New t| Now that most people are working their brains and nerves more
Light on strenuously than ever it is specially desi'rable that up-to-date in-
~j formation should be widespread concerning the essentials of nerve-
nutrition. Physiological research has been advancing with each
decade, but very fewT men and women know anything of the prac-
tical results. The Sanum E. Institute, 59, Edgware Road, Hyde
Park, W.2, have issued a booklet entitled "How to Rebuild Shat-
tered Nerves and Maintain Biain Stamina," which sets out in
clear, non-technical language some of the more vital points in the
increasingly acute problem of nervous endurance and restoration.
The booklet calls attention principally to the fundamental import-
ance of the "tissue-salts" — or organic minerals — in the main-
tenance of physical well-being. It is shown that we need not so
much feeding up with concentrated protein-substances (which has
been so much in vogue), but rather an adequate supply of the
organic salts. These same substances in an isolated chemical
condition are of little or no use. They need to be in organic com-
bination, as in " Neuron.'' A presentation copv of this instructive
booklet may be obtained from the abovei-mentioned address if
The English Review is mentioned.
I he *J Life is a strenuous business at the best of times, and life without
First Good health is certainly not worth living. The poet Herrick said :
"Health was the first good lent to men." But we live at such
a pace to-day that every care should be taken of this first and
greatest loan to employ it to the best advantage. The use of
" Bynogen " is eminently calculated to effect this purpose. It
contains a suitable proportion of a specially prepared extract in
a soluble form, which is obtained from selected wholemeal and
malt, with milk protein and organic phosphates. "Bynogen " is
a nerve food with a specially agreeable flavour, and is a food
adjunct that induces healthy sleep. Everyone who is run down or
nerve-strained should try " Bynogen," made by Messrs. Allen and
Hanburys, Ltd., Lombard Street, E.G. 3, and is obtainable from
is. 9<i. from all chemists.
The LOSS €| Few people realise what a grievous loss one hundred huts and
of 100 Huts recitation centres mean to the Church Army, and how urgent it is
to replace these huts, which were engulfed in the great enemy
attack. They must be replaced, and towards that end everyone
is urged to help. The huts are an absolute necessity for giving
comfort and cheer to the men immediately before and after fight-
ing-— these men who are standing between England and deadly
peril, and to whom we have need to be grateful every hour of our
lives. Huts cost £500, Tents £'300, fully equipped, and it is not
difficult to raise the necessary money to replace the lost hundred
with a little work and enthusiasm. Large sums are raised for
The English Review Advertiser
TATCHO
I QM HAIR GROWER
A few drops of Tatcho
occasionally and vigorous
brushing — and you will
be able to say with Mr.
Geo. R. Sims —
1 Look
Hair now
at my
The very name of Tatcho inspires confidence. As Mr.
Geo. R. Sims, the author, dramatist and philanthropist,
said to the editor of the Daily Mail, "Look at my hair
now, look at the colour. Isn't that convincing evidence
of the value of Tatcho. Ladies confirm my good
opinion of it."
From Chemists and Stores everywhere at 1/3, 2/9 and 4/6.
Photo l>y\
Mr. G. R. SIMS.
[l.avis, hastboiit
"Mr. Benger's
admirable
preparation.
The LANCET
Food
for Infants,
Invalids & ^ Aged.
Throughout the War
and in all parts of the world
Benger's Food has been in con-
stant use in Military, Red Cross
and private hospitals.
Benger s Food "stands by" in
the crisis of illness at all ages. It
is most highly nutritive and easily
digested.
BENGER'S FOOD LTD.S Manchester.
PLEASE CONTRIBUTE TO THE
War Fund Church Ar mu
(Registered under the War Charities Act, 1916),
which supports the following' branches of war activity, among others :
700 (formerly 800, 100 lost in
recent fighting) Recreation Huts,
Tents and Centres for Men of
H.M. Services at home (including
a number at northern naval bases),
France (including about 100 still
under shell fire), Italy, Malta,
Egypt, Palestine, Macedonia, East
Africa, Mesopotamia and India.
Kitchen Cars on West Front (several
recently destroyed by enemy).
Hostels (Buckingham Palace Hotel
and others) for Men on leave in
London.
Farm Training for Discharged Men.
Social Club in London.
Hostels for Discharged Men while
learning trades.
Convalescent Home for Wounded,
and Hostel for Limbless Men
while being refitted.
Friends and Treats for Men in hos-
pital far from home.
Rest Huts and Hostels for Girl
Munitioners.
Hostels and Recreation Rooms for
Wives of Service Men, &.C., &c.
YOUR ASSISTANCE is earnestly asked
towards the necessarily LARGE OUTLAY.
Cheques crossed " Barclay's, a/c Church Army," payable to Prebendary Carlile, D.D.,
Hon. Chief Secretary, Headquarters, Bryanston Street, Marble Arch, London, W. I.
War Charities every day. The work of the Church Army is more
than a War Charity — it is a war necessity — and a war duty which
should be shared by all. Apart from the lost one hundred there
are still seven hundred Recreation Huts, Tents, and Centres at
home and at the various fighting fronts — including' about one hun-
dred in France still under shell fire. Prebendary Carlisle, D.D.,
is the life and soul of the Church Army, and all cheques, crossed
"Barclays, a/c Church Army," should be made payable to him,
Hon. Chief Secretary, Headquarters, Bryanston Street, Marble
Arch, W. i.
The Pen ^1 *'n everything to-day our soldiers come first. They stand between
- ,, us and disaster; they suffer hardship uncomplainingly, and because
of them we are kept in safety and comfort. When a gift season
Trenches comes round our first thoughts go to the men at the front — indeed,
as far as the soldiers and sailors are concerned, every season is
a gift season, or ought to be. Parcels from home are great things
to the men everywhere, and if a parcel from home contains by
chance a " Swan " Fountpen, it has a value which cannot be
over-estimated. Letters are the only solace to the people at home,
and the men at the front employ most of their spare time in keeping
themselves linked up by letter with those they love. There is no
better medium than the famous " Swan " to meet all the writing
demands on both sides. It is as popular with the W.A.A.C.s and
the W. R.E.N. s as it is with the men of both Services, and, more-
over, it is still obtainable at pre-w7ar prices — the safety pattern
from 125. 6d. and the standard pattern from half a guinea.
"Tatcho"Q Everybody in middle life has been struck by the fact that to-day
the physiological changes of advancing maturity are far less
apparent than they were a generation ago — stoutness, inactivity,
and other indices have almost disappeared, and, what wTas perhaps
the most common form of physical deterioration, baldness, is
becoming more and more rare. The reason for all this is un-
doubtedly improved hygiene, plus the careful investigation of causa-
tion, and the discovery of efficient remedies. Amongst the latter
" Tatcho " holds high place, it is, in fact, one of the few new
words of power ; generally recognised in the bright lexicon of
middle age, and the fact that a personality so gifted and astute
as Mr. George R. Sims, with his unique position amongst his
contemporaries, is the guarantor of "Tatcho's" genuine and re-
markable powers of renewing the growth of hair, and giving nature
a fresh start, is enough to commend this well-established compound
to our serious attention. Thanks to a competent business organisa-
tion, the prescription has been placed at the disposal of the public
upon extremely easy terms ; it can be found wherever civilisation
penetrates, ready to hand, and many thousand men and women
bear silent but constant testimony to its beneficial efficiency, but
if spoken and written gratitude is sought for by the sceptical this
"is also to be found a thousandfold.
The English Review Advertiser
vn
You can have a "Swan"
that will suit you
better than any other
pen you are using
"Swan" Fountpens are distinguished
for simplicity, strength, and entire
freedom from complicated or wearing
parts. The pens are accurately made,
and the parts fit to a nicety. Balance
and form have been studied to give com-
fort in writing with large ink capacity
WAN
SOLD BY STATIONERS AND JEWELLERS
Illustrated Catalogue post free
^Iabie Todd & Co., Ltd., London, Manchester Paris, Zurich
Sydney, Toronto, etc. •
Associate House : New York and Chicago.
AT PRE-WAR PRICES from 10/6
viii The English Review Advertiser
IMPRESSIONS
A MAGAZINE FOR
PROGRESSIVE PEOPLE
THERE is no magazine in the world just like
IMPRESSIONS. It treats business as the most
important thing in material life, and shows in a fascin-
ating manner how easy it is to get pleasure and a
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THERE are no technical articles in IMPRESSIONS.
The great subject of business is handled in a way
which provides inspiration for all, whatever their
profession or trade or calling. IMPRESSIONS stands
for better business and better living in the highest
sense of the term. It is the monthly mentor of our
biggest business men, and in its own circle carries an
influence more powerful than outsiders can understand.
It is edited by G. E. Whitehouse, who, in a remarkably
short time, has earned for himself an international repu-
tation for being the most interesting yet fearless writer
on Business subjects. He writes a large part of the
magazine each month; says what he thinks, and thinks
so nearly right that big men believe in him and
applaud his views.
IMPRESSIONS is a big magazine, 11 in. xoj-in., with
48 pages, full of sound editorials and high-grade
advertising. If you believe in progress you will like
this magazine though you may not agree with every-
thing it prints.
SUBSCRIPTION 6/- PER ANNUM.
Sample Copy for six penny stamps.
IMPRESSIONS PUBLISHING CO., LTD.,
76, Hanover Street, EDINBURGH.
The English Review Advertiser
IX
Belli
IHRII
MUMS,
Tobacco
Mild but satisfying fragrance
— pleasant sweetness that
endures to the last — delicious
coolness which is exceedingly
grateful to the sensitive
palate ....
• King's Head "
is similar
but stronger
Both are sold everywhere
Hid per oz
Three Nuns
Cigarettes
MEDIUM
5|d for 10— lid for 20
Boxes of 50 2/21—100 4/3
ECONOMICAL NUTRITION
In times of food scarcity it is
the more necessary that what
is eaten should be completely
digested and thoroughly assimilated.
The concentrated nutri-
ment 'Bynogen' introduced
by Alien 8 Hanbury Ltd.
corrects the digestive dis-
turbance often associated
with nervous conditions
and thus enables the
digestive organs to make
the best use of the food
taken. The addition of a
specially prepared extract
obtained from selected
whole wheat and ma!t
assists assimilation and
gives 'BYNOGEN' a
palatable flavour.
%J Brings Health
Sold by all Chemists at //9, 3/-, 5/- & 9[-
ALLEN & HANBURYS Ltd.
Lombard Street, London, E.C. 3
Established in the City of London. A.D. 1715
B52
REVOLUTION
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Bought by Thousands of Officers.
Cross Cheque or P.O. Lotidon
City and Midland Bank.
MAY t& CO.
(Dept. 92), 3, Tudor St., London, E.C. 4.
The English Review Advertiser
MR. MURRAY'S NEW BOOKS
SIR JOSEPH D. HOOKER, the life and letters of
By LEONARD HUXLEY. Based on Material collected and arranged by LADY
HOOKER. Illustrated. 2 vols. 36s. net. Second Impression Nearly Ready.
WHAT THE NAVY HAS DONE AND IS DOING.
THE SECRET OF THE NAVY
By BENNET COPPLESTONE, Author of " Lost Naval Papers," " Jitny and the Boys."
Contains experiences of our heroic sailors and their exploits during the war which will
come as a revelation to many readers. Illustrated. 7s. 6d. net.
FURTHER "LINES" BY BOYD CABLE
FRONT LINES
By the Author of "Between the Lines," "Grapes of Wrath," "Action Front."
Punch says of Boyd Cable : — " No one can describe more vividly the fierce confusion of
trench fighting."— 6s. net.
MY WAR DIARY
By MADAME WADDINGTON. "As a writer of letters and memories she has won
admiration before. . A valuable addition to the war library." — WestminsterGazette. 6s.net.
A NEW VOLUME BY HORACE A. VACHELL.
SOME HAPPENINGS
By the Author of " Fishpingle," "Quinneys,"&c. "There is a vivacity about the dialogue
and a neatness of outline about the portraits which give the reader all satisfaction." —
The Times. 6s. net.
SHOOTING DAYS
By CAPTAIN ERIC PARKER, Shooting Editor of The Field.- " A refreshment for the
mind and a reminiscence of happier days." — The Times. 6>. net.
JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET, W.I.
Annual Subscription
Post Free to all parts of the World - - - 15/0
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with the issue, for which I enclose the sum
of
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The English Review Advertiser
XI
THE CURE OF CONSUMPTION
ASTHMA, BRONCHITIS, AND NASAL CATARRH
The Dr. Edwin W. Alabone Treatment
Articles are frequently appearing in the
newspapers and magazines, written by
persons who, whilst they deplore the
serious loss the United Kingdom sustains
annually through the ravages of consump-
tion, hold out no hope of a cure being
found. What these people write regarding
| tuberculosis naturally tends to have a very
depressing effect on consumptives who are
unfortunate enough to read pessimistic
statements. We hasten to say that the
belief in the impossibility to cure phthisis
is absolutely without foundation, and the
sooner the established fact that consump-
tion can be cured is everywhere appreciated
the better it will be for the masses.
It is not due to the much-vaunted open-
air measures that we are enabled to state
that victims of consumption can be restored
to health and strength, but to the specific
treatment for phthisis and allied complaints
promulgated by Dr. Edwin W. Alabone,
which undoubtedly offers the best possible
chance of cure. It has been put to the
severest tests, and its success has been
phenomenal, especially in view of the fact
that so many of the patients cured have
not commenced the treatment until the
eleventh hour, after their cases had been
given up as nopeless in other quarters.
As we have before mentioned, any reader
who happens to be personally interested in
the vitally important question of the cure
of consumption should acquaint himself
with the modus operandi of the Alabone
method of treatment. Tt would certainly
be worth his while to do so.
Thousands of people have been cured by
this treatment, verv manv of whom have
written telling of the benefit thev have
received.
The following letter is of interest : —
" Birmingham.
"The Dr. E. W. Alabone Treatment.
" Dear Sir, — I feel compelled to state
briefly my firm belief in your treatment of
Phthisis.
"I have just concluded a six months'
course of treatment, and I have en-
deavoured to comply with your instructions
kindly given me from time to time. I
believe at the time I took up vour treat-
ment the disease had not gone verv far,
but from that time I steadily put on weight
and my general condition gradually im-
proved, and I am very pleased, and indeed
thankful, to inform you that after bein£
tested in many ways during the last three
months, I am now pronounced cured. I
have to thank you for the very business-
like and courteous manner in which you
have dealt with my case, including the
prompt despatch of medicines and replies
to inquiries I have made during mv course.
I should have no hesitation whatever in
earnestly recommending the Alabone
Treatment to anyone suffering from the
disease. — I am, dear Sirs, yours faithfully,
"A. C. H."
This case, previous to adopting the
Treatment had been in a sanatorium, and
had tried Tuberculin Injections.
"" Worcester.
"The Dr. Edwin W. Alabone Treatment.
" Dear Sirs, — I was yesterday examined
by my doctor, who was verv pleased with
the result of the examination. He said
that he could not find any trace of active
disease, and that, in his opinion, I could
now discontinue the Alabone Treatment.
" I should now like to put on record my
appreciation of the benefits I have received
from your Treatment. I am sure it has
been the means of restoring me to a state
of good health and strength again. You
may be sure that I shall recommend the
Treatment to anyone suffering from Con-
sumption with whom I mav come in con-
tact.— I remain, vours very sincerely,
"W. S."
The most complete information on this
important question will be gladly supplied
on application to the Secretary, The Dr.
Edwin W. Alabone Treatment, Lynton
House, 12 Highbury Ouadrant, London,
N.5.
Of course, we need hardly point out that
what has now come to be known as "The
Alabone Treatment " for Consumption and
Asthma is not a success in every instance ;
naturally some do not recover ; neverthe-
less, the claim is perfectly justified that in
the great majority of cases it is possible
to effect genuine and lasting cures, even
where the disease is far advanced.
One cannot do better than advise any
reader to obtain a copv of Dr. Alabone 's
important book, "The Cure of Consump-
tion, Asthma, Bronchitis, and other Dis-
eases of the Chest," now in its 49th
edition, 174th thousand, which will be for-
warded for 2s. 6d., post free, from Lynton
House, 12 Highburv Ouadrant, London, .
N.5.
Xll
The Enelish Review Advertiser
THE ENGLISH REVIEW
Edited by Austin Harrison
CONTENTS OF THE ONE HUNDRED-AND-SEVENTEENTH NUMBER
1. W. B. YEATS
2. GERTRUDE BONE
3. ALBERT BUHRER
4. R. VVATSON KERR
In Memory of Robert
Gregory
Meadowsweet
Love's Fear
June, 1018
5. THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS PRIZE ESSAY
H. N. BRAILSFORD
6. T. STURGE MOORE Soldier-Poets (iii)
7. KATHERIXE MANSFIELD Bliss
81
84
85
86
87
102
108
[Con/ents continued on ]xtge xiv
®C3@[2®[?[r
— that is all
tkat is needed
to start or stop the
"LISTM-BRUSTOf
ELECTRIC LIGHTING ^PUMgMG
mm
the plant can be
seen working at
47. Victoria St.
Westminster .
NO COSTLY ACCUMULATORS
PRACTICALLY NO ATTENTION
Catalogue from
R.A.LlSTER>C°LrP
Dursley.Glos.
The English Review Advertiser
xin
Ty\f%4-m-mffx (~}-QFf±t' This picture, " Miss America Advances— She Celebrates The Arrival of The Wilson Boys,
X lvlUrC V-MICI printed in colours on art paper 15 ins. by 10 ins., will be sent free to any smoker forward-
To " De ReSZke" Smokers >ng to address below a" De Reszke" box lid and 4d. in stamps, mentioning Picture No. 59.
<SMiss oAmerica <tAdvances
-r-1 • j tzttt She Celebrates 7 'he Arrival
bjplSOde V 111 0f The Wilson Boys
" Here's to Old Glory, Miss America — and to the Huskies who are fighting under it in France."
" Thank you, dear boys. We've come right into the game with you now, haven't ive ? Fritz will
learn a thing or two when he comes up against ' Uncle Sam's Best.' "
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Miss America Advances
VIII
Herald of the Great Advance-
Here's a free spontaneous toast
To the millions now in France
From Columbia's farthest coast ;
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Conie to help us in our need,
Come to fight for Freedom's day.
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Toast we then in Nectar sweet-
Sure, the glass holds no regrets—
And to make the toast complete,
Smoke " Ue Reszke " Cigarettes.
J. T. W.
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De Reszke "« American
CIGARETTES
XIV
The English Review Advertiser
CONTENTS (continued)
8. E. BELFORT BAX
9. EDITH G. REID
10. EDWARD GARNETT
11. MRS. ALEC-TWEEDIE
12. MERLIN
13. AUSTIN HARRISON
14. L. GOLDING
15.
The Modern State, In-
ternationalism, and War 120
A Recollection of Presi-
dent Wilson 129
The All-Highest
133
McCudden, the Air-
man V.C. 137
The Tragedy of Ireland 140
f The War Office and
Mr. H. A. Barker 144
( A Tax on Books 149
Colour in Salonica 155
Books 158
%*&.% f<\
■ .""■■;ijy* — " —
.
•
THIS was a typical scene on
Glasgow Green over 200 years
ago, when Bowling was
indulged in by the gallants of the
time, who even then enhanced the
pleasures of the game by smoking,
although they knew nothing of that
perfect blend of American and
Oriental Tobaccos sold to-day as
" SMITH'S GLASGOW MIXTURE."
F. & J. SMITH. Glasgow.
Manufactur rs of "ORCHESTRA"
High-Class Virpini^n Cigarettes
MILD
MEDIUM
Per
10
id.
II
FULL
OZ.
Branch of the Imperial Tobacco Co. (of Great Britain and Ireland), Ltd. S284
The English Review Advertiser
xv
BermalinE
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for Free Sample Loaf and address of nearest
Btrmaline Ra^er.
"^
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100 for 2s. 9(1. , post free. Western Dental Mfg.
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Samples, post free 3d. stamps.
XVI
The English Review Advertiser
The advertisements of Pope &> Bradley are occasionally civilised.
MRS. HANUMAN'S INDISCRETION.
A Fable.
By H. DENNIS BRADLEY.
(The /resent ridiculous state of the law of libel must serve as an apology for the introduction of Bibical nomenclature.)
IT was in an evil moment for his peace of mind
that Huppah, the Oldest Monkey in the
Cage, slyly abstracted a piece of newspaper
from a passing small boy.
It was for its possible contents that the old
gentleman annexed the sheet, he had no itch for
news.
But contents there were none, and finding time
hang upon his h mds he commenced to read the
paper with that easy-going tolerant contempt for
the degenerate human which is so marked among
the Monkey-World Intellectuals.
" Pho ! " he remarked scornfully, "a nice
mess our descendants have got themselves into !
' Grave Wool Shortage ! ' ' black Outlook for the
Future!' 'Possibility of No Clothes!' Serve
them right, the bare, smooth-skin rascals.
Precious ugly some of them will look, to be sure."
And he giggled to himself. "A nice sight that
fat, bald-headed old human who tried to prod me
with his stick this morning will make, with not a
stitch or a hair to cover him, and not a spark of
humour to warm him ! 'No wool !' ; well, that
doesn't affect us of the pure breed stock ; " and he
stroked his fur complacently.
Idly he commenced to tear the sheet into scraps
of paper, and amused himself by watching them
flutter to the floor of the Cage.
" • Meat Shortage.' Bah ! ' Further Reduction
of Spirits.' Pooh! ' Ma ch Scarcity.' Pish!
'Possible Coal Famine.' Tush! Civilisation?
Gosh! . . . Paradise Lost ! ! Whatever are the
idiots on the other side of the Cage doing ?"
An item caught his eye that made him pause.
" ' Fight to the Last Man ! '" he muttered, and
became suddenly thoughtful. A worried look
stole into his eyes and he called his aged wife,
Jochebed, to his side.
"The Last Man," she repeated in amazement,
when he had read the passage to her. " Huppah,
what does it mean to us ? "
"By the bones of Hanuman, Father of All the
Monkeys," he growled, "it looks as though we
shall have to begin all over again " — she gave a
little squeak of nattered alarm— "but," he went
on grimly, " let us at least take care the New Darwinian product is more intelligent than the last."
"But were we really to blame?"
" We were careless, my dear," he replied with immense decision.
"I have always thought Mrs. Hanuman rather flighty," she murmured, woman like.
"Something more than flighty, I fear, judging by results," corrected the old gentleman. " Poor
Hanuman, he had his hands full. I always pitied him— almost as much as I pitied the Tertium Quid.
She led them both a pretty dance ! "
Mrs. lochebed turned savagely on her spouse.
"That's right," she snapped acidly, "blame the female, of course!"
Huppah scratched his head, and then raised his voice imperiously. " In any case," he commanded,
" should it be necessary to start all over again, see to it that the laws of simian eugenics are properly
respected. Make it your sole aim to avoid the evolution of a degenerate race liable to fits of Armageddon."
And Jochebed, his wife, became right thoughtful.
*******
Leaving the subject of Mrs. Hanuman's infidelity and its tragic consequences, if we fight to the last
yarn of wool Pope & Bradley will of necessity be compelled to supply hair-producers. Meanwhile
the wool shortage will grow less acute with the man shortage. Getting on with the war, the
following prices are unghoulish. Lounge Suits from £7 7s. ; Dinner Suits from ^10 10s. ; Service
Jackets from £$ 15s. 6d. ; Riding Breeches from ^4 4s. 14. Old Bond Street, W.i.
(L0.
^M80-
Jwere 7/c fo S/ame ?
One of the saddest features of the war' is the horrified
remorse and shame of the intellectuals amongst the monkey-;.
In thoughtful simian circles it is recognised that some-
thing went gravely wrong somewhere in the process of
evolution, and all sorts of reasons have been adduced, the
most widely accepted being the notorious flightiness — and
worse— of the First Monkey's spouse.
Thus even again we have the sad spectacle of the
indiscretions of the mothers being visited on the billionth
generation.
Eugenics is — or are — a wonderful study.
THE
ENGLISH REVIEW
August, 191 8
In Memory of Robert Gregory
By W. B. Yeats
(Major Robert Gregory, R.F.C., M.C„ Legion of Honour, was killed in actio
on the Italian Front, January 23, 1918.)
Now that we're almost settled in our house
I'll name the friends that cannot sup with us
Beside a fire of turf in th' ancient tower,
And having talked to some late hour,
Climb up the narrow winding stair to bed;
Discoverers of forgotten truth
Or mere companions of my youth,
All, all are in my thoughts to-night, being dead.
Always we'd have the new friend meet the old,
And we are hurt if either friend seem cold,
And there is salt to lengthen out the smart
In the affections of our heart,
And quarrels are blown up upon that head ;
But not a friend that I would bring
This night can set us quarrelling,
For all that come into my mind are dead.
Lionel Johnson comes the first to mind,
That loved his learning better than mankind,
Though courteous to the worst ; much falling he
Brooded upon sanctity
Till all his Greek and Latin learning seemed
A long blast upon the horn that brought
A little nearer to his thought
A measureless consummation that he dreamed.
82 THE ENGLISH REVIEW
And that enquiring man John Synge comes next,
That, dying, chose the living world for text,
And never could have rested in the tomb
But that, long travelling, he had come
Towards nightfall upon certain set apart
In a most desolate stony place,
Towards nightfall upon a place
Passionate and simple like his heart.
And then I think of old George Pollexfen,
Well known for horsemanship to Connacht men
In muscular youth, at meets or at racecourses,
That could have shown how pure-bred horses
And solid men, for all their passion, live
But as the outrageous stars incline
By opposition square and trine,
Having grown sluggish and contemplative.
They were my close companions many a year,
A portion of my mind and life as it were,
And now their breathless faces seem to look
Out of some old picture book;
I am accustomed to their lack of breath,
But not that my dear friend's dear son,
Our Sidney and our perfect man,
Could share in that discourtesy of death.
For all thing's the delighted eye now sees
Were loved by him ; the old storm-broken trees
That cast their shadows upon road and bridge ;
The tower set by the stream's edge ;
The ford where drinking cattle make a stir
Nightly, and startled by that sound
The waterhen must change her ground ;
He might have been your heartiest welcomer.
When with the Galway foxhounds he would ride
From Castle Taylor to the Roxborough side
And Eserkelly plains, few kept his pace ;
At Moneen he had leaped a place
So perilous that half the astonished meet
Had shut their eyes ; and where was it
He rode a race without a bit ;
And yet his mind outran the horses' feet.
IN MEMORY OF ROBERT GREGORY 83
We dreamed that a great painter had been born
To cold Clare rock and Galway rock and thorn,
To that stern colour and that delicate line
That are our secret discipline
Wherein the gazing heart doubles her might ;
Soldier, scholar, horseman he,
And yet he had the intensity
To have published all to be a world's delight.
What other could so well have counselled us
In all lovely intricacies of a house
As he that practised or that understood
All work in metal or in wood,
In moulded plaster or in carven stone;
Soldier, scholar, horseman he,
And all he did done perfectly,
As though he had but that one trade alone.
Some burn damp fagots, others may consume
All the combustible world in one small room
As though dried straw, and if we turn about
The bare chimney is gone black out
Because the work had finished in that flare ;
Soldier, scholar, horseman he,
As 'twere all life's epitome;
What made us dream that he could comb grey hair ?
I had thought, seeing how bitter is that wind
That shakes the shutter, to have brought to mind
All those that manhood tried, or childhood loved,
Or boyish intellect approved,
With some appropriate commentary on each,
Until imagination brought
A fitter welcome ; but a thought
Of that late death took all my heart for speech.
E 2
Meadowsweet
By Gertrude Bone
The narrow hills turned all die light aside
And sent a radiant river through the lane ;
Imprisoned in the standing hay, a wind
Rustled like rain.
Afoot for flight, the orchis with green wings,
And bryony with every leaf a shield,
Told of midsummer, as the thunder low
Of bees in the clover-field.
And one walked by me with unyielding eyes,
Remembering ever what he would forget.
The beating of the guns that tale by tale
Counted out death.
I led him to a way of deeper peace
And quiet fold of a lit beechen steep,
Where at their heart the trees an echo hid
Of water falling deep.
Heavy with fulness of summertime,
The opulent fragrance of the meadowsweet
Stirred the warm stillness, as of one who rose
Our coming- on to meet.
*s
Sudden he stopped as one who might not leave
Behind him something that in silence sat.
Then turned with patience back. " Upon the Somme
Death smells like that.
" The battle dropt me in a wrecked pleasaunce
Of bleeding vines and roses drooping red ;
Pain-held I lay, afar my eyes could reap
The harvest of the dead.
" There where the sunny boon of corn should be,
Cloying and sweet, all reeling to the brain,
Smell of mortality, floated that scent
Like meadowsweet in rain."
MEADOWSWEET 85
" Oh bitter ever be the meadowsweet ! "
I cried in horror of that mouth of pain.
" Is it not here," he said, " your gentry set
A Calvary in the lane ?
" Type of all sacrifice ? Have done," he said,
" The wound's long stanched of Immortality :
But this red-brimming flood of mortal loss
Floweth most bitterly.
" For me, I see the living generous Christ
Come from the rood and walk with healed feet.
' Here is my agony where my companions die,
Shrine me the meadowsweet."'
Love's Fear
By Albert Buhrer
When I do think of moments that are waste
In hostile anguish and unholy doubt,
When life's clear spring is stagnant as from drought
And Love's distil is bitter to the taste :
When in tempest of destructive haste,
Sweet worlds of precious thought are put to rout,
The lamps of Truth and Virtue flicker out,
And all the mind is tenebrous, unchaste :
Then would I fly to thee, like stricken deer,
Inevitably doomed — with laboured breath,
Hunted by those twin-hunters Fate and Death,
Incessant baying at my senseless ear;
For some rich voice above the tumult saith,
Hide thou within Love's bosom from thy fear.
June, 1 9 1 8
By R. Watson Kerr
June ! the joyous, sun-filled month of June
When roses, emblems of a heaven, croon
Strange melodies in garden and in hedge
With blithesome birds that sing in emerald edge
Of English lanes; and thousand other flow'rs
As sweet drench incense on the air in show'rs —
Intoxicating wine that gives fair dreams
Of palaces in Paradise, and streams
Of visions far surpassing Kubla Khan !
When cool sweet winds blow from the woods to fan
Two lovers lying kissing in the grass
Where sun-lit waters glimpse and, laughing, pass !
June ! a writhing, war-gorged month of hell
When steel and iron and high explosive yell
Cursed cacophonies in blasted plains,
With singeing bullets singing in the lanes
Of ripped France; and poisonous vapours drench
With death the air and earth — pocked with trench
And gaping scar — so he who breathes them in
Gulps strangling hands that clutch and tear at him
And vision sees of no cool Kubla Khan;
When rancid gusts from charnel tree-stumps fan
Two soldiers, clutching, kissing in the grass,
Whose souls leak out in spurting red and pass !
THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS
PRIZE ESSAY
Foundations of Internationalism
By H. N. Brailsford
To inquire amid universal war whether a League of Nations
be possible, may be to challenge experience and tilt against
fact. At a first glance it may seem that we must begin our
ascent to an international ideal on the lowest rung of the
ladder of hope. If the inhabitants of Sirius and Saturn, who
looked at our planet in Voltaire's Micromegas, were again to
take up their microscopes, they would discover little novelty
in our occupations. They would still see " a hundred
thousand madmen of our species " engaged in massacring
another hundred thousand, and learn that certain " sedentary
barbarians " gave orders for these exercises, in the interval
between digesting their dinner and praising God. They need
revise this summary view of our . ant-heap " only by substi-
tuting millions for thousands. It would be their trite conclu-
sion that man is still a wolf to man. We who are in the " ant-
heap " can discern, however, another truth about this process.
War is an operation of the social instinct. If tragedy is the
conflict of two rights, war is the shock of two social organisms.
It is the ultimate expression of the solidarity which knits a
social unit. Of the social units which we call national States
it is broadly true that war is possible between them, but not
within them. That elementary fact must be our clue in any
investigation of the problem of a durable peace. If, by the
creation of a League of Nations, we mean merely that the
external bond of a treaty of arbitration is to link States, which
retain their old individualism and their traditions of nationalist
morals and nationalist economics, it would be folly to suppose
that we can abolish war. Theoretically, the only security
seems to lie in some organic international association, which,
by the creation of intimate and pervasive relationships of
interdependence within itself, is at least in process of evolu-
tion towards the ideal of international solidarity.
88 THE ENGLISH REVIEW
There is certainly no warrant in history for the assumption
that the national State, or even the composite Empire, is the
final form of the social unit, which alone can claim our loyalty
and subordinate our egoistic strivings. From the clan to the
Empire the social unit has passed through many phases of
evolution and expansion. To this process the social instinct
of the citizens has adapted itself with surprising versatility.
In the nineteenth century war was still possible between the
States of disunited Germany and Italy. To-day the sons of
fathers who knew neither Germany nor Italy fight for the
larger national unit with the instinctive passion of clansmen.
An academic demonstration that the social unit is elastic and
the social instinct adaptable will not carry us far towards our
goal. The (dominating fact of our generation in world-politics
has been the formation of a new type of association, much
larger, though much looser in its structure, than anything that
endured in the past. The modern alliance is incomparably
more intimate than the dynastic groupings and the military
coalitions of the past, and promises to be more permanent.
The two groups which divided Europe on the eve of this
war had formed the habit of concerted action even in the
normal operations of peace. Austria was Germany's "bril-
liant second " in every diplomatic exchange, and France
expected, without always receiving, a like support from Russia.
When the Dual Alliance became the Triple Entente, British
finance fell into line and shared with France the risks of main-
taining the financial stability of Tsardom. The fact that in
the precarious balance of pre-war Europe the safety of each
Power might depend on the prosperity, the solvency, and the
efficient armament of its allies had begun to blur, though not
to obliterate, the dividing lines of national egoism and
separatism. The war has in both camps carried this evolution
immeasurably further. There is a common purse while the
war lasts; there is even in our combination a common larder.
The rationing among the Allies of essential food supplies
and raw materials implies a community of interest that is,
even in war, a new fact in international life. Pitt's subsidies
were only a shadowy anticipation of this system. It is already
recognised that much of this common machinery must outlast
the war.
These are political phenomena, but they must assuredly
have a large reaction upon economics. On the whole, it was
broadly true before this war that financiers acted by prefer-
ence or necessity in national groups. There were, however,
FOUNDATIONS OF INTERNATIONALISM 89
interesting anticipatory types which seemed to point to the
coming internationalisation of some of the, more highly
organised forms of production. An international agreement
in the steel trade parcelled out to each of the chief national
industries the world-market in steel rails. It needs no
elaborate argument to show that the rationing of raw materials
after the war by the Allies must involve an understanding
not merely as to what each Ally requires for its own national
consumption, but also an understanding as to the export trade
of each in the manufactured articles. Within each group of
Allies commercial rivalry must diminish, and co-operation, or
even syndication, tend to take its place. However calculating
and self -regarding this process may be, it must play its part
in breaking down, at least in the upper world of industry and
finance, the cruder and more egoistic assumptions of nationalist
economics.
What is true of our own combination is even more obviously
true of the compacter enemy group. The ideal of " Mittel-
europa " seems now on the point of realisation. Austria and
Germany announce that their alliance is to be " deepened and
extended." If there is, on the one hand, a closer military
union, there is projected on the other a much more intimate
economic partnership. Within tariff walls, which will be
lowered, if they are not levelled, the enterprising kartels and
the pioneer banks will extend their operations until the whole
of Central Europe has become a single economic unit. It is
no transitory phenomenon of war that we are witnessing. If
hate and fear have heated the furnaces that are fusing allies
together, this tendency to closer amalgamation is an inevitable
consequence of our industrial evolution and of the opening
up of communications. War shapes its political form, but it
uses tendencies already active in our economic life. In the
post-war alliance, as it is sketched in the Paris Resolutions
and the plans of " Mitteleuropa," we have a new social unit
designed to survive in peace as in war, a structure which
gathers within itself not merely the combatant, but also the
productive energies of society. The purely national era in
history has been transcended.
If the closer organisation as permanent military and
economic alliances of these two groups involves within them
some development and enlargement of the social conscious-
ness, it also carries with it a challenge and menace to posterity.
While these two coalitions survive, every war must needs be
a universal war. It wants a hardy optimism to believe that
9o THE ENGLISH REVIEW
after a sullen peace the equilibrium between these two super-
national groups could long be stable. Each would labour to
detach the less contented and the less loyal partners of the
rival coalition. An active contest would proceed between
them for the allegiance of the remaining neutrals. Every
bitter memory, every new suspicion would give to their
organised rivalry in trade the passionate colour of a political
contest. No promptings of economy could long restrain
the inevitable rivalry in armaments. As they strove for the
opening of closed markets and for access to raw materials,
the will to prosper' and live would drive them, as soon as the
ravages of this war were repaired, to an even sharper conflict
over a more elementary issue. A decorous truce, a) bloodless
rivalry, is barely conceivable if, at the settlement of this war,
two unreconciled coalitions confront each other with a pro-
gramme of economic war. We shall make either one super-
national League or two. It is a choice between war and peace.
There is in human affairs a dialectic by which evil cures
itself by its mere excess. National strife has led us to a war
of coalitions. Let us inquire whether the dread of its renewal
in a still more terrible form can impose upon us the immense
achievement of constructing a single League of Peace.
We have seen that the social unit is itself variable and
elastic, and there are indications that the social instinct can
adapt itself with surprising versatility to the variations of this
unit. This argument, though it clears away some preliminary
doubts, is far from being decisive. We have still to cope with
the direct and positive tendencies which in the past have
insisted on the forcible settlement of disputes. The mind of
Europe, as we knew it on the eve of this war, was, in the mass,
precisely such a complex of thwarted impulses and half-
successful inhibitions as Freud and his school have studied
in the mental life of the individual. Through the subcon-
scious life of most European nations there ran the recurrent
motive of a desire for some organic change, some international
readjustment, which was hardly to be attained in the world
as we knew it by the normal processes of peace. The French
desire for the revanche and the lost provinces, the Serbian
passion for Jugo-Slav unity, the Bulgarian craving for
Macedonia, and Italian Irredentism are the more obvious
instances of these restless demands for change. Add to these
the romantic passion of the Russian Imperialist for Con-
stantinople, and the sense of the German patriot that the
FOUNDATIONS OF INTERNATIONALISM 91
extension of his Empire overseas, measured relatively by that
of Britain or France, was far from corresponding to the vigour
of his national organism, its population, or its industrial
capacity, and you have accumulated fuel enough even for a
world-conflagration. These impulses were restrained from
year to year and from decade to decade by prudence, by
morals, by the fear of the world's public opinion. The rigid
structure of our international life opposed their realisation.
Of some of them (notably the Alsatian and South Slav ques-
tions) we may say confidently that no radical solution was
conceivable without war. Others, and especially the Colonial
questions, were capable under favourable conditions of a
pacific settlement. Even so, the disputes which turned on our
tenure of Egypt, on the French claim to Morocco, on the
Anglo-Russian rivalry in the Middle East, on German ambi-
tions in Turkey and Africa (as the Lichnowsky Memorandum
shows), were settled only after prolonged periods of tension
and some narrow escapes from war. Even in these more for-
tunate instances the appeal to force was made, though both
sides recoiled in the end, after the dry warfare of armaments,
from the actual shedding of blood. The impulses to change,
which made no formal war, were none the less active. They
worked on the play of national motive ; they piled up arma-
ments; they forged alliances. Again, and yet again, such an
impulse as the French desire for la revanche, though it made
no war, availed to deflect a nation's policy from the course
which might have led to peace. To all these radical impulses
towards war the Anglo-Saxon peoples are strangers. We
have no unredeemed kinsmen ; our estate in the world is
ample ; we possess all that force might win. The consequence
is that we are apt to apply to the problem of an enduring
peace a set of conceptions essentially conservative. We aim
too exclusively at security. We conceive a League of Peace
too simply as an organisation which will stereotype the status
quo and repress the disturber of the established order. That
way lies stagnation and, in the end, the inevitable insurgence
of living forces against this death in life. Change is a
biological necessity. The damning verdict on the old Europe
is not that its suppressed impulses for change flamed at last
into a universal war, but rather that its structure was so rigid,
its power of self-adjustment so limited, that save through war
no radical change was possible within it.
With this preface it is possible to advance to a closer
statement of our problem. If the aim of a League of Nations
E* 2
92 THE ENGLISH REVIEW
be to restrain lawless force and to prevent the recurrence of
such a conflict as rages to-day, it must furnish an international
organisation which can ensure that timely changes shall be
effected in the world before any people is driven by an intoler-
able grievance, or even by a reasonable ambition, to force
change by arms. That definition may seem remote to the man
whose aspirations are limited to security. Security in every
community, however, is purchased only by a constant adapt-
ability. The penalty of rigidity in the State is revolution, as
in the world of States it is war. The architect of such a League
has a double task before him. He must persuade the satisfied
and conservative Powers that their safety depends in the long
run on their entry into a combination which must impose some
limits on their sovereignty — limits, it is true, of the kind which
every permanent Alliance exacts to-day. He must persuade
the restless and ambitious Powers that the structure and con-
stitution of the League offer some guarantee that their aspira-
tions, in so far as they can be reconciled with the common
good, will be fairly met. He will encounter from both parties
an obstinate scepticism.
The Powers which regard the League primarily as an
insurance against attack will riddle the defensive basis of its
covenant with doubt. That covenant, however it is eventually
drafted, must probably provide (i) for the submission of all
acute international disputes to the appropriate tribunal,
council, or mediator for settlement; (2) for a suspense of all
warlike acts, and also of mobilisation, until the supernational
authority has published its finding, and for some time there-
after; (3) for the joint action of all the signatory Powers to
repress any Government, by economic and, at need, by military
coercion, if it should violate this pact. These are tremendous
undertakings. The risk is twofold. Some Power may break
its covenant, and if it has provided itself with allies the con-
flict which results will reproduce the present strife with some-
thing of the added bitterness of civil war. Again, it is a large
assumption that in such a case all the innocent Powers would
keep their bond and rally to the defence of the League ; and
even if in name they did so, they might not furnish their con-
tingents with sufficient generosity or alacrity. There is no
final answer to these doubts. No human institution can
promise to work with mechanical perfection, and life would
lose half its stimuli if all danger were eliminated. The prac-
tical answer to this scepticism is, summarily, that on no terms
r3n we avoid these risks, and that anv other kind of insurant
FOUNDATIONS OF INTERNATIONALISM 93
reproduces them in a more aggravated form. The man who
declares that he will never trust the signature of the Power
which violated Belgium to any covenant whatever must be
invited to follow two simple lines of thought. In the first
place, the Power which has given its bond, even if its repute
for faith stands low, has some obstacles to overcome before it
can break its word, which would be absent if it were unpledged.
With some resistance, however ineffective, and on some reluct-
ance it must reckon among its own population, and on some
loss of prestige it must count beyond its frontiers. In the
second place, so far from assuming that every Power will
spontaneously keep its oath, the League is an elaborate system
of insurance against oath-breaking. The Entente's combina-
tion was built up on divers motives and calculations, in some
cases by painful and difficult bargaining, during three years of
war, by the gradual adhesion first of Italy, then of Roumania,
and lastly of America. The League will be ready, without
these delays and without bargainings, to act unitedly on the
single ground that its covenant has been violated.
The sceptic who questions whether all the innocent
Powers would fulfil their obligation must face the
objection that an Alliance itself offers no absolute security.
Two late Allies of Germany have fought against her, and
one of ours has quitted our camp. " Treaties," as Lord Salis-
bury said, " are mortal" ; and the only inventions which the
wisdom of the past had erected as a security against war have
ceased to be even plausible illusions. Alliances give no
absolute security. The Balance of Power resembles the flux
of Heraclitus. There is only one thing which may always
with safety be affirmed of it : it oscillates. Nor should we, if
we could carve frontiers, annex naval bases, and dominate
straits at our good pleasure, be nearer to absolute safety.
Invention laughs at strategical locksmiths. The Power which
had secured itself on the face of the waters discovered that its
peril lay below them. If that danger could be conjured away
we should waken to find that our precautions had forgotten
the resources of the air. There is, in short, no substitute for
a League of Nations which is immune from risks. This, how-
ever, one may say : the Partial Alliance challenges and pro-
vokes the danger of war. It makes the risk, because by its
constant and costly provision against it, it assumes the prob-
ability of war as the central fact of international life. It
allows the thinking of mankind to start from the reckoning
that war is inevitable, and it is not surprising that the passions
94 THE ENGLISH REVIEW
of men proceed to verify the prediction which treaties and
armaments steadily proclaim. A League of Nations will start
from the contrary assumption. It will proclaim that law is
the rule and crime the exception. When that belief is em-
bodied in institutions, the thinking of mankind will adapt itself
to the new order.
The objections which will come from the more adventurous
Powers, whose interest lies in future change, may be some-
what harder to meet. The League's architect must satisfy
them not merely that they will receive fair and considerate
treatment in its courts and councils, but also that when an
award or recommendation is published there will be a reason-
able probability that it will be executed. The standard
schemes of the League do not propose to make the enforce-
ment of these awards obligatory on the League. That is
probably a wise limitation, but the League would promptly
dissolve unless, with or without a formal undertaking, it con-
trived in clear, and grave, and urgent cases that the decisions
of its Courts and Councils should be respected. There is
probably little difficulty about justiciable disputes, wrhich can
be referred to decision by a court following recognised prin-
ciples of law. The more speculative and doubtful aspect of
the League opens out, when we reflect that the disputes which
commonly lead to war, turn on issues neither of fact nor of
law, and can be settled only by an application of current
standards of policy and morals, wrhich vary from generation
to generation, and which no two peoples would define in the
same terms. Can a Council of Conciliation be composed
which will not merely be free from prejudice and bias, but
will command an authority so great that both disputants will
bow to it? Let us assume that it will not attempt to impose
ideal justice — ideal justice is a moral dynamite which would
wreck any human society — but will suggest rather compromise
solutions which will ease acute disputes. Even so, it is
evident that such a Council can neither be set up, nor trusted,
nor obeyed, save upon one general condition : that there is a
measure of confidence and good will among all the more
influential Powers when the League is created. That condi-
tion is at the lowest so difficult that one must beware of over-
stating it. It need imply no sentimental reconciliation, no
evangelical readiness to love one's enemy. It means primarily
this : that all the leading Powers should be so convinced of
the necessity for a League that they will make concessions to
ensure its smooth working. Not sentiment, but the effective
FOUNDATIONS OF INTERNATIONALISM 95
will to make a workable League is the first condition of its
creation. Should we make the League, we are realists enough
to perceive that it would fail if a Power so considerable as
Germany had reason to feel that she met with less -than justice
within it. Needless to say, the necessity for a like spirit of
concession from her would be equally imperative. Without
minimising the importance of questions of mechanism in
devising the League, it is on the ability to create an atmo-
sphere of confidence that its future depends.
It may be that the effort of conceiving a League based on
mutual confidence demands from human nature in time of
war an impossible agility of mind. We live in the passionate
moment, and propaganda, guiding the spontaneous tribal
instinct, has forced the trend of our thoughts into a single
channel. Popular oratory seems to assume that Germany is
the first Power which ever broke a promise or treaty — if,
indeed, she is not the only Power that ever committed aggres-
sion. From these emotional premises there follows the natural
conclusion that the chief, if not the only, task of a League of
Nations will be to mount guard over her in the future. In
such a spirit the Allies went to the Congress of Vienna. After
nominating themselves policemen oyer France, they pro-
ceeded to sanction their own robberies at the expense of Poles
and Italians, and the Congress which met to conclude one
war made arrangements which ensured a succession of wars^
If this narrowly legal and coercive spirit presides over the
creation of the League, it will not better the record of the
Holy Alliance. It is doubtful whether the enemy would
aspire to join a League conceived on this model, and if he
remains outside it it may be a great defensive alliance, but iir
will not be a League of Peace. A partial alliance can never
ensure justice in the world, for the simple reason that, with
its eyes inevitably fixed on the Balance of Power, it will not
always dare to check the injustices which its own partners
may be moved to commit. Undoubtedly a World-League
must prepare its coercive apparatus, and cannot neglect the
indispensable sanction of co-operative force. Without that
no sense of security could be created in Europe, and each
Power would continue to prepare against future perils by the
old technique of the armed peace. We shall build the League
ill, however, if we attempt to lay its foundations solely upon
force. A wise architect will rather attempt to recommend it
to every civilised people by the advantages it confers. It
96 THE ENGLISH REVIEW
must be a society which assures to its members benefits so
indisputable that no civilised Power can afford to stay outside
it, to secede from it, or to court expulsion by its own disloyal
conduct.
The evolution of the two great Alliances during this war
is a pointer which indicates what the basic advantages of the
League must be. It must prepare to diffuse equitably over
the whole world the economic benefits which each com-
bination now proposes to reserve for its own members. Raw
materials, including the staple foods, have become the pivot
of world-politics. If Horace could re-write his ode he would
speak not of the auri sacra fames, but of the hunger for iron-
ore. Either we shall distribute the cotton, the metals, the
rubber, the wool, the oil, and the grain to each according to
his need, or we must face a generation of turmoil, intrigue, and
war to determine their allocation. There is a " right to work "
for nations as for individuals, and the new mercantilism which
would monopolise the materials of industry for one Power
or one group of Powers would make a cause for future war,
which would enlist the workers no less than the capitalists.
In this single expedient we probably have the key to the
creation and maintenance of the League. With an inter-
national control over the flow of raw materials across frontiers,
the League could recruit every civilised State in its ranks.
With the power to stop this flow, it would have a sanction at
its command which every State must dread. If it is regarded
,f as the source which ensures to all the world its regular supply
of essential things, it will readily build up for' itself a loyalty
which would never be earned by a supernational police-court.
There are other advantages of a like kind in the economic
S> field which it would be expedient to organise and dangerous to
neglect. It would be at its own peril that the League tolerated
tariff-wars within its ranks, or the penalisation of some
members by others on political grounds. Such tariffs would
work as prosaic hymns of hate. It seems desirable, if not
necessary, that all members of the League should accord
most-favoured-nation treatment to each other. The struggle
to acquire colonies will continue to be a cause of war unless
the open door to all civilised traders is adopted as the rule
in all the non-self-governing dependencies subject to members
of the League. In the manipulation of these direct advan-
tages we have the answer to our problem of confidence and
good will. A League which confers these benefits fairly on
all its members, and makes for all the opportunity to live and
FOUNDATIONS OF INTERNATIONALISM 97
grow, will create by this means alone the necessary atmosphere
of confidence.
Some other concrete conditions for any workable League,
indispensable as they are, must be passed over with a bare
enumeration : — (1) There ought to be in the charter of the
League itself some general declaration which assures to all
clearly defined national minorities in Europe at least cultural
autonomy. Failing this, the League might have no status to
intervene even to check a persecution which sooner or later
might lead to war. (2) If defensive alliances survive, they
must include a clause which dispenses one ally from support-
ing another in any action contrary to the covenants of the
League. (3) The large question of the " freedom of the
seas " cannot be ignored. It certainly must mean the modest
minimum which is all that Naumann asked for in a recent
series of articles : the right in peace to load and unload goods
freely in any civilised harbour. It cannot mean the old
charter of individualist thinkers — freedom for neutral, and
even for " innocent " enemy, commerce in war-time. Modern
war rests on industry, and its evolution has all but abolished
the "non-combatant," emptied the old idea of "innocent"
trade of meaning, and made even of neutrality a barely tenable
status. We must follow this logic honestly. If such drastic
measures as the embargo are to be applied in the name of
civilisation, the civilised world as a whole must itself impose
them. The League alone should have the right to sanction
these more general methods of naval coercion, and would
impose them only against a Power which had defied its
covenants. There is no sacrifice to us here if we have our-
selves renounced the thought of waging war at our own dis-
cretion for our own national advantage. We shall have lost
nothing if we fight only for the defence of public right with
the flag of the commonweal at our masthead. (4) The
economic exhaustion of all the belligerents will probably lead
directly to some concerted measures for the reduction of arma-
ments on sea and land. There is here no sovereign remedy
against war, for great armies can be improvised and under-
sea armadas and air-fleets can be rapidly built. The gain will
be great, but indirect. It will help to release the Continent
from the oppressive moral atmosphere of the armed camp.
It will lessen the economic drive towards war from the arma-
ment industries, which ought everywhere to be nationalised.
Lastly, and especially in Prussia, it will diminish the numbers
of the professional military caste, lessen its social prestige,
98 THE ENGLISH REVIEW
and cut the ties which, through family interests, involve the
propertied class in a support of the military hierarchy.
It is narrow thinking which conceives of the League of
Nations merely as an august association to promote arbitra-
tion. If it were only that, it would be less than that — a
pathetic aspiration remote from the shaping forces of the
real world. The biological need of change must compel the
League to assume, however tentatively, some of the functions
of an international government, which will guide, and even
impose, change when change is due. The dominance of the
economic motive in the modern world will oblige it to be
from the start an organisation which can confer and can with-
hold economic benefits. Here — and no less when it ap-
proaches disarmament — it touches the deeper springs of
human motive, and begins to modify with an international
purpose the structure of society itself.
The ruling condition of any League of Nations, that there
shall be an atmosphere of confidence within it, leads us to the
supremely delicate question, whether confidence requires as
a formal condition of entry that every member of the League
shall be a " democracy." That appears to be the prevailing
opinion in America. One is tempted to counter such demands
by the preliminary question whether democracy anywhere
exists. It is at the best an ideal, nowhere fully realised, and
a close analysis might show that political democracy is in
isolation an impossible ideal so long as wealth means power
and low levels of education permit the interested organisation
of opinion. The current belief that the masses are everywhere
pacific may truly describe their spontaneous and habitual
temper. The plain fact is, however, that the masses nowhere
in normal times give any effective attention to foreign affairs
at all. They will not clamour for war unless an assiduous
and interested campaign directed from above them has first
aroused them. But neither, while this apathy and ignorance
continue, are they an effective bulwark of peace. Their lack
of direct interest in world-politics means that while they will
never intervene to dictate a course of policy that will lead to
war, they can scarcely as yet be reckoned as a disciplined and
instructed force which will impose a policy consistent with
peace. These reflections tend to diminish the immediate im-
portance of insisting that " democracy " must be a formal
condition of entry to the League. No mere political con-
stitution could ensure that, the vague pacific tendencies of the
FOUNDATIONS OF INTERNATIONALISM 99
masses would, in their present condition of apathy, be trans-
lated into foreign policy. The attempt to define and impose
such a test would promptly confront us with the fact that
Japan and Roumania are no more democratic than Germany,
while another school of thought would question the claim of
the Russian Soviet Government. It would, indeed, be difficult
to lay down any condition of entry which discriminated
between one form of government and another without repeat-
ing, albeit in the democratic direction, the grosser errors of
the Holy Alliance. It is true, none the less, that confidence
will with difficulty be established in the League if any leading
Powers retain a system of government which to others seems
an anomaly and an anachronism. There is, however, one test
which might be generally imposed. We may well say that
in this supremely important transaction of concluding a lasting
Covenant of Peace, we must deal with peoples and not merely
with Governments. That the treaty which erects the League
should be everywhere ratified by a representative Parliament,
freshly elected, would be a proper and reassuring stipulation.
One might even, with the French Socialist Party, go further,
and ask for a formal referendum of ratification from the whole
body of citizens. That would be a novel and impressive
guarantee. It is obvious that the old secret diplomacy, with
the methods uncovered in the "Willy-Nicky" correspondence
and in the " Secret Treaties " of the Allies, is incompatible
with an era of confidence. The banishment of this antiquated
technique must be left, however, to the vigilance of each
nation and each Parliament acting under the spur of inter-
national public opinion.
It is not the smallest recommendation of the League that
for the first time its procedure will reinforce democracy and arm
public opinion, wherever democracy is in any degree a reality.
One may safely say that on the eve of this war every people
of Europe beyond the Balkans had reached a stage of moral
evolution in which it honestly condemned aggressive war. The
painful anxiety of the German Government to prove to its
own people that it was acting on the defensive, is proof, if
proof were needed, that in the mass the German people were
no exception to this rule. The general advance in morals
which had brought civilisation so far as this, was, however,
wholly impotent to prevent war, and under like conditions will
always be so. The vertiginous speed of the crisis which
brought us to the abyss, the secrecy of the negotiations, the
ease with which Governments after the outbreak of war could
ioo THE ENGLISH REVIEW
state their own case, with their own selected facts, to an
alarmed and excited people, forbade any preliminary trial of
the issue by public opinion. Even with more leisure and
more publicity, one may doubt whether any people has in
the mass the historical sense and the objectivity of mind to
be the judge of its own Government in a complex issue after
passion has been aroused. We all condemn aggression, but
where was the canon by which aggression could be tried ? The
idea of the League supplies its own simple and almost
mechanical criterion. Democracy need no longer criticise the
handling by its own rulers of a complicated diplomatic trans-
action. Aggression stands defined for it. " Did you carry
your dispute to the appointed council ? Did you abide its
decision without warlike acts? Did you accept the decision
it pronounced? Did you, in a word, observe our covenant? "
Where is the democracy so simple that it will not ask these
questions? Where is the Government so secure that it dare
ignore them? If it is true that to develop democracy is to
promote peace, it is equally true that to ensure peace is to
reinforce democracy. To raise a presumption in favour of
peace, to heighten the general expectation that peace can
always with good will be preserved, is also to weaken the
arguments by which the militarist state maintains its internal
discipline. To end the armed peace of the old era is also
to make an anachronism of the Prussian State, which could
explain its rejection of democracy only as a defensive measure
against the enemies which " encircled " it on " two fronts."
The essential test of any State's fitness for the League is that
it desires to submit to its conditions. Let us believe that
effects will follow causes. When a State disarms it must
abandon the politics of feudalism. When that State seeks
entry into the League of Nations, it will by that act with
its own hands destroy its militarism.
We shall be slow to learn the lesson of history unless we
perceive by the glare of conflagration the defects of our pre-
war morality. A League of Nations demands from us nothing
less than an ascent from the habit of international rivalry to
the ideal of co-operation. The material expansion of our
century had hurried civilisation into tasks for which it was
unripe, and equipped it with physical powers which its social
conscience could not control. We had acquired, as it were,
new senses and new limbs, but as we acted with prompt and
imperious force in the far corners of the earth, we brought
FOUNDATIONS OF INTERNATIONALISM 101
to our new contacts with multitudinous races less than the
necessary sympathy. In the international test of this war the
Christian Churches have failed, and unlike International
Socialism they do not even know that they have, failed. If
the growth of a new morality meant that by taking thought,
the lonely individual must add to his moral stature^ we might
well plead our finitude, and despair. There is inspiration
still in the old doctrine of the French Enlightenment that
human nature is an infinitely malleable and plastic stuff. The
" prejudices/' to use its favourite word, which hampered inter-
national co-operation in the past may never yield to formal
reasoning. The evolution on which we may reckon is rather
that the new institutions, by setting men in new relations,
must in the end transform their thinking. To make England
from the Heptarchy was no less a miracle than to weld'Europe
out of six Great Powers. Enlarge the social unit and a
certain expansion of our social instincts must follow the out-
ward change. The habit of regarding foreign trade as a sort
of warfare could hardly survive such a new fact as the ration-
ing of the world's raw materials by a supernational authority.
To recognise the common need and the common interdepen-
dence is to begin the transformation of economic motives.
The habit of regarding conquered territory and subject peo-
ples from the standpoint of the possessor and the proprietor
had its rational root in the institutions of the past. Safety
depended on man-power, and to acquire new populations
which could be recruited was to guarantee security. In a
world of economic struggle to possess territory was the
obvious way of ensuring one's own access to raw materials.
To gain new co-operative guarantees of safety, and to ensure
the equitable division of the world's raw materials, is to cut
both these roots of possessive and acquisitive nationalism.
The slow modification of the concepts which underlie
nationalist economics must follow as a League of Nations is
gradually built up. Its future depends in the long run on
its appeal to the imagination of the growing child. Ideas
must have hands and feet, and move upon the earth. Let us
neglect no chance of giving to the new institutions a visible
form, a rallying symbol, a capital, and a social focus. Men
will always love " the little platoon " to which they belong.
It is the function of education to teach them that a " divine
tactic of history " has bidden this platoon to keep its set place
and perform its ordered evolutions in a greater army of
comrades,
Soldier-Poets (iii
By T. Sturge Moore
Edward Thomas had wandered over literature and
England, and shaped a mind that, at first opinionated, had
saddened and mellowed. In the end he became a poet and
a soldier almost at the same time, and now is dead. His
success in prose had always been middling, breeding further
discontent; do his poems* greatly succeed? Every time I
read them I like them better. " Lob," his longest effort, was
the first I saw; it was perfectly dissociated from him by the
assumed name of " Eastaway " and appeared to me full of
promise, though unwieldy, but in this collected volume his
quality does not strike me as like a young man's, but wily,
artful, and aware of many traps.
Rise up, rise up,
And, as the trumpet blowing-
Chases the dreams of men,
As the dawn glowing
The stars that left unlit
The land and water,
Rise up and scatter
The dew that covers
The print of last night's lovers —
Scatter it, scatter it 1
While you are listening
To the clear horn,
Forget, men, everything
On this earth newborn,
Except that it is lovelier
Than any mysteries.
Open your eyes to the air
That has washed the eyes of the stars
Through all the dewy night :
Up with the light,
To the old wars ;
Arise, arise.
Though the impulse to write that was strong, it has con-
stantly obeyed the bridle of keen literary taste, its grace is
not like that of wild life, but like that of horsemanship, and
will be the more admired the more fully the difficulties over-
come are appreciated. In some of these poems novelty is
sought as though felicity were despaired of, yet a few are
really happy. Keats believed that felicities should so chime
in with the human soul as to seem known before, even though
a pre-natal existence had to be supposed to justify that im-
pression. Novelties in poetry fail if merely new. Mr. Yeats
* Poems by Edward TJiomas. Selwyn and Blount. 3s. 6d. (Quotations
by permission of Mrs. Edward Thomas.)
SOLDIER-POETS 103
has of late years set the fashion of skating across ever thinner
ice until it seems almost miraculous that verse is not prose.
You watch the skater as the surface warps under his swift
passage and expect that another minute he will, be in it,
floundering like any Walt Whitman, but this does not happen.
Rhyme is not discarded, but strained ; rhythms are not free,
but licentious. Thomas shows this tendency in ways of his
own neither very determined nor very risky, yet sometimes
annoying. These sleights of his art are intended, like those
of others, deftly to dazzle the most sophisticated judges, and
in so far betray a greater preoccupation with manner than
with matter — a fault of proportion. The creative mind con-
siders the manner solely as the servant of the import and just-
ness of its theme.
Thomas knew life after a fashion that was not the fashion
he had intended to discover it in. The passionate young-
man hawks for experience with his fancy, but the quarry
brought to his feet is not often that at which he let his falcon
fly.
" He has robbed two clubs. The judge at Salisbury
Can't give him more than he undoubtedly
Deserves. The scoundrel ! Look at his photograph !
A lady-killer ! Hanging's too good by half
For such as he." So said the stranger, one
With crimes yet undiscovered or undone.
But at the inn the Gipsy dame began :
"Now he was what I call a gentleman.
He went along with Carrie, and when she
Had a baby he paid up so readily
His half a crown. Just like him. A crown 'd have been
More like him. For I never knew him mean.
Oh! but he was such a nice gentleman. Oh!
Last time we met he said if me and Joe
Was anywhere near we must be sure to call.
He put his arms around our Amos all
As if he were his own son. I pray God
Save him from justice! Nicer man never trod."
This is the spirit of Borrow rather than that of Words-
worth. Yet I divine a hankering for spiritual intensity akin
to that of the more central master. These poems drift across
a profound hunger for ideal human relations ; like those float-
ing gardens of Kashmir, they traverse an incommunicable
want, as one of them says —
Content with discontent
As larks and swallows are perhaps with wings.
An acceptance of the encountered actuality far less cavalier
than that of the Tinman's antagonist.
Though Thomas had waved a flag like those who
throw their energies into a movement, the comrades
io4 THE ENGLISH REVIEW
tramping' by his side and following were heard like
echoes making his foot's thud sound all the more
lonely. That heraldic picture of Simple Life Returning
blazoned on the banner seemed no truer to his vision than
those unsubstantial reverberations multiplying the " plod-
plod " of his two feet ; till he felt most solitary when agree-
ment with him was most general. To adore remote places
with quaint names became a fashion, but he retreated from
prose to poetry in shy alarm.
The country and simple lives have their beauty, but, what
is more obvious, they are picturesque, inventoried stage pro-
perties of well-worn appeal. This picturesqueness deludes
men after they have despaired of more ideal beauties, such as
can only be recognised in particular cases by very rare souls.
For Wordsworth, country folk were the matrix out of which
an ideal life might yet be moulded, his dearest thoughts and
passionate aspirations rejoiced or suffered on their account.
Deep country ancientness and Celtic magic had raised
Thomas's enthusiasm, but his mind did not unite with what
it admired, and gradually felt undeceived, and this disillusion-
ment was closer to reality .than his infatuation had been. At
a cross-roads he says : —
I read the sign.. Which way shall I go?
A voice says : " You would not have doubted so
At twentv." Another voice gentle with scorn
Says: "At twenty you wished you had never been born."
Though doubtless minor disappointments intensified the
feeling, in a general sense one would imagine that his birth
vexed him because it had not befallen in a pastoral age, in
Arcady, in Ireland, when Cuchulain was about, or in the
Middle Ages, when the oldest of existing barns was building.
This soul, we say as we read, must have chafed against modern
circumstance. Union with nature, between man and the most
essential conditions of his life, such as that supposed to have
been achieved in far-off times and places, has a true ideal
value; it does correspond to a profound and rational aspira-
tion. Honour, then, to its at times quaint and perverse ex-
pression ! But observant eyes see more than they look for.
And Thomas, who took pains to visit and know the most un-
touched parts of England and Wales, and who drank to the
dregs the considerable literature which can feed such curiosity,
though he still loved nature, was undeceived about man and,
as a corollary, about himself. It dawned upon him that man's
need is nobler impulses rather than choicer circumstances,
that the soul seeks a mood and should not be put off with
SOLDIER-POETS 105
hopes and desires, for we can only possess that which we can
truly appreciate.
When we two walked in Lent
We imagined that happiness
Was something different
And this was something less.
But happy were we to hide
Our happiness, not as they were
Who acted in their pride
Juno and Jupiter.
For the Gods in their jealousy
Murdered that wife and man,
And we that were wise live free
To recall our happiness then.
Thus many men and women look back at a full-illusioned
youth with something of envy and yet with a sense of freedom
at the thought that those headstrong young people are really
dead, which allows them to smile with the world, not in scorn
of it, to be tender and kind instead of passionate and self-
absorbed. Freedom from that fervid seriousness permits
humorous playfulness, permits a vital possession of our own
scorned past, and has gentle acceptance for the stream of
shortcoming which is daily life.
If every hour
Like this one passing that I have spent among
The wiser others when I have forgot
To wonder whether I was free or not,
Were piled before me, and not lost behind,
And I could take and carry them away,
I should be rich ; or if I had the power
To wipe out every one and not again
Regret, I should be rich to be so poor,
And yet I still am half in love with pain. . . .
What a contrast to Wordsworth, who always looked back
to his youth" as freshly arrived from heaven and wished to bind
maturity and age to it by conscious piety. He had been born
free ; Thomas achieved freedom at the cost of disillusionment :
yet it was part of his latter-day riches that he had been so
deceived long ago. Better so than to have been without fire,
than to have been dull, torpid, and mean. Yes, yes; but not
better than to have been a creative artist, thrilling and an-
guishing about work that was more important than the work-
man. But with freedom came the inspired moods at last, and
prose gave way to poetry.
While the sweet last-left damsons from the bough
With spangles of the morning's storm drop down
Because the starling shakes it.
The swift with wings and tail as sharp and narrow
As if the bow had flown off with the arrow.
Like the touch of rain she was
On a man's flesh and hair and eves.
106 THE ENGLISH REVIEW
November's earth is dirty . . .
And the prettiest things on the ground are the paths
With morning and evening hobnails dinted,
With foot and wing-tip overprinted
Or separately charactered
Of little beast and little bird.
Such things must always make a poet supremely happy at
whatever stage of life they may be written. And where there
is simple joy, playfulness and tenderness will find room.
If I should ever by chance grow rich
I'll buy Codham, Cockridden, and Childerditch,
Roses, Pyrgo, and Lap water,
And let them all to my elder daughter.
The rent I shall ask of her will be only
Each -year's first violets, white and lonely,
The first primroses and orchises —
She must find them before I do, that is.
But if she finds a blossom on furze
Without rent the}' shall for ever be hers,
Codham, Cockridden, and Childerditch,
Roses, Pyrgo, and Lapwater —
I shall give them all to my elder daughter.
And to his wife : —
And you, Helen, what should I give you?
So many things I would give you
Had I an infinite great store
Offered me and I stood before
To choose. I would give you youth,
All kinds of loveliness and truth,
A clear eye as good as mine,
Lands, waters, flowers, wine,
As many children as your heart
Might wish for, a far better art
Than mine can be, all you have lost
Upon the travelling waters tossed,
Or given to me. If I could choose
Freely in that great treasure-house
Anything from any shelf
I would give you back yourself
And power to discriminate
What you want and want it not loo late,
Many fair days free from care
And heart to enjoy both foul and fair,
And myself, too, if I could find
Where it lay hidden and it proved kind.
The Muse rarely lays her hand for the first time on a man
in his late thirties, and when this happens we ought not to
be surprised if he proves himself a considerable poet with com-
plex and subtle moods. Thomas in this thin volume ranges
from mere impressionism to creation as exquisite as this : —
The clouds that are so light,
Beautiful, swift, and bright,
Cast shadows on field and park
Of the earth that is so dark,
And even so now, light one !
Beautiful, swift, and bright one!
You let fall on a heart that was dark,
Unillumined, a deeper mark.
SOLDIER-POETS 107
But clouds would have without earth
To shadow, far less worth :
Away from your shadow on me
Your beauty less would be,
And if it still be treasured
An age hence, it shall be measured
By this small dark spot
Without which it were not.
A really finished and lovely poem, which will improve
with long pondering and often repeating. This man had
fought for his own freedom and won against considerable
odds before he went out to fight for ours. Through his art, as
under limpid water, one sees the opinionated, savage youngster
whom he first was, lying drowned — exclusive in his love of
Celtic magic and deep-country ancientness, despising many
fine things because he associated them with towns and globe-
trotters, but the real man's soul with its depth and stillness
has charmed all that turbulence, so that it now lies like a pic-
ture of itself under glass. Not born free, but self-freed like
a plant that lifts a stone, or a sapling that splits a rock before
it can show the world its proper beauty, and, for us discovered,
like that hooded wayfarer at the supper-table only recognised
after he has vanished, as better than our kindest thoughts had
dared suppose. Our house was not well ordered, he should
not have had to write hastily for his own and his children's
bread, we have lost the chance of using him to the best ad-
vantage ; yet he leaves us more than we deserved, something
that will be treasured by posterity for ever. As his body fell
its cloak melted off the soul and we caught a glimpse which
confounded our poor recollections of the man, and words of
his still tolling round our ears make us aware that for him this
dark casualty had a different meaning.
Here love ends,
Despair, ambition ends,
All pleasure and all trouble,
Although most sweet or bitter,
Here ends in sleep that is sweeter
Than tasks most noble.
There is not any book
Or face of dearest look
That I would not turn from now
To go into the unknown
I must enter and leave alone
I know not how.
The tall forest towers ;
Its cloudy foliage lowers
Ahead, shelf above shelf;
Its silence I hear and obey
That I may lose my way
And myself.
Bliss
By Katherine Mansfield
Although Bertha Young was thirty she still had moments
like this when she wanted to run instead of walk, to take
dancing steps on and off the pavement, to bowl a hoop, to
throw something up in the air and catch it again, or to stand
still and laugh at — nothing — at nothing, simply.
What can you do if you are thirty and, turning the corner
of your own street, you are overcome, suddenly, by a feeling
of bliss — absolute bliss ! — as though you'd suddenly
swallowed a bright piece of that late afternoon sun and it
burned in your bosom, sending out a little shower of sparks
into every particle, into every finger and toe ? . . .
Oh, is there no way you can express it without being
" drunk and disorderly" ? How idiotic civilisation is! Why
be given a body if you have to keep it shut up in a case
like a rare, rare fiddle ?
" No, that about the fiddle is not quite what I mean,"
she thought, running up the steps and feeling in her bag for
the key — she'd forgotten it, as usual — and rattling the letter-
box. " It's not what I mean, because Thank you,
Mary " — she went into the hall. " Is nurse back? "
"Yes, M'm."
" And has the fruit come ? "
"Yes, M'm. Everything's come."
"Bring the fruit up to the dining-room, will you? I'll
arrange it before I go upstairs."
It was dusky in the dining-room and quite chilly. But
all the same Bertha threw off her coat; she could not bear the
tight clasp of it another moment ; and the cold air fell on her
arms.
But in her bosom there was still that bright glowing place —
that shower of little sparks coming from it. It was almost un-
bearable. She hardly dared to breathe for fear of fanning it
higher, and yet she breathed deeply, deeply. She hardly
dared to look into the cold mirror — but she did look, and it
gave her back a woman, radiant, with smiling, trembling lips,
with big, dark eyes and an air of listening, waiting for some-
BLISS 109
thing . . . divine to happen . . . that she knew must happen . . .
infallibly.
Mary brought in the fruit on a tray and with it a glass
bowl, and a blue dish, very lovely, with a strange sheen on
it as though it had been dipped in milk.
"Shall I turn on the light, M'm?"
" No, thank you. I can see quite well."
There were tangerines and apples stained with strawberry
pink. Some yellow pears, smooth as silk, some white grapes
covered with a silver bloom and a big cluster of purple ones.
These last she had bought to tone in with the new dining-
room carpet. Yes, that did sound rather far-fetched and
absurd, but it was really why she had bought them. She had
thought in the shop : " I must have some purple ones to bring
the carpet up to the table." And it had seemed quite sense
at the time.
When she had finished with them and had made two
pyramids of these bright round shapes, she stood away from
the table to get the effect — and it really was most curious.
For the dark table seemed to melt into the dusky light and the
glass dish and the blue bowl to float in the air. This, of
course, in her present mood, was so incredibly beautiful . . .
She began to laugh.
" No. No. I'm getting hysterical." And she seized her
bag and coat and ran upstairs to the nursery.
Nurse sat at a low table giving Little B her supper after
her bath. The baby had on a white flannel gown and a blue
woollen jacket, and her dark, fine hair was brushed up into a
funny little peak. She looked up when she saw her mother
and began to jump.
" Now, my lovey, eat it up like a good girl," said Nurse,
setting her lips in a way that Bertha knew, and that meant
she had come into the nursery at another wrong moment.
" Has she been good, Nanny ? "
" She's been a little sweet all the afternoon," whispered
Nanny. " We went to the park and I sat down on a chair
and took her out of the pram and a big dog came along and
put its head on my knee and she clutched its ear, tugged it.
Oh, you should have seen her."
Bertha wanted to ask if it wasn't rather dangerous to let
her clutch at a strange dog's ear. But she did not dare to.
She stood watching them, her hands by her sides, like the poor
little girl in front of the rich little girl with the doll.
no THE ENGLISH REVIEW
The baby looked up at her again, stared, and then smiled
so charmingly that Bertha couldn't help crying :
" Oh, Nanny, do let me finish giving her her supper while
you put the bath things away."
" Well, M'm, she oughtn't to be changed hands while she's
eating," said Nanny, still whispering. "It unsettles her; it's
very likely to upset her."
How absurd it was. Why have a baby if it has to be
kept — not in a case like a rare, rare fiddle — but in another
woman's arms?
" Oh, I must ! " said she.
Very offended, Nanny handed her over.
" Now, don't excite her after her supper. You know you
do, M'm. And I have such a time with her after ! "
Thank Heaven ! Nanny went out of the room with the
bath towels.
"Now I've got you to myself, my little precious," said
Bertha, as the baby leaned against her.
She ate delightfully, holding up her lips for the spoon
and then waving her hands. Sometimes she wouldn't let the
spoon go; and sometimes, just as Bertha had filled it, she
waved it away to the four winds.
When the soup was finished Bertha turned round to the
fire.
" You're nice — you're very nice ! " said she, kissing her
warm baby. " I'm fond of you. I like you."
And, indeed, she loved Little B so much — her neck as she
bent forward, her exquisite toes as they shone transparent in
the firelight — that all her feeling of bliss came back again,
and again she didn't know how to express it — what to do
with it.
" You're wanted on the telephone," said Nanny, coming
back in triumph and seizing 'her Little B.
Down she flew. It was Harry.
"Oh, is that you, Ber? Look here. I'll be late. I'll take
a taxi and come along as quickly as I can, but get dinner
put back ten minutes — will you? All right? "
" Yes, perfectly. Oh, Harry ! "
"Yes?"
What had she to say? She'd nothing to say. She only
wanted to get in touch with him for a moment. She couldn't
absurdly cry : " Hasn't it been a divine day ! "
" What is it ? " rapped out the little voice.
BLISS in
" Nothing. Entendu" said Bertha, and hung up the
receiver, thinking how more than idiotic civilisation was.
They had people coming to dinner. The Norman
Knights — a very sound couple — he was about to start a
theatre, and she was awfully keen on interior decoration, a
young man, Eddie Warren, who had just published a little
book of poems and whom everybody was asking to dine, and
a " find " of Bertha's called Pearl Fulton. What Miss Fulton
did, Bertha didn't know. They had met at the club and
Bertha had fallen in love with her, as she always did fall in
love with beautiful women who had something strange about
them.
The provoking thing was that, though they had been about
together and met a number of times and really talked, Bertha
couldn't yet make her out. Up to a certain point Miss Fulton
was rarely, wonderfully frank, but the certain point was there,
and beyond that she would not go.
Was there anything beyond it? Harry said " No." Voted
her dullish, and " cold like all blond women," with a " touch,
perhaps, of anaemia of the brain." But Bertha wouldn't
agree with him; not yet, at any rate.
" No, the way she has of sitting with her head a little on
one side, and smiling, has something behind it, Harry, and I
must find out what that something is."
" Most likely it's a good stomach," answered Harry.
He made a point of catching Bertha's heels with replies
of that kind ..." liver frozen, my dear girl," or " pure flatu-
lence," or " kidney disease "... and so on. For some strange
reason Bertha liked this, and almost admired it in him, very
much.
She went into the drawing-room and lighted the fire; then,
picking up the cushions, one by one, that Mary had disposed so
carefully, she threw them back on to the chairs and the couches.
That made all the difference; the room came alive at once.
As she was about to throw the last one she surprised herself
by suddenly hugging it to her, passionately, passionately. But
it did not put out the fire in her bosom. Oh, on the contrary !
The windows of the drawing-room opened on to a balcony
overlooking the garden. At "the far end, against the wall,
there was a tall, slender pear tree in fullest, richest bloom;
it stood, perfect, as though becalmed against the jade-green
sky. Bertha couldn't help feeling, even from this distance, that
it had not a single bud or a faded petal. Down below, in the
xi2 THE ENGLISH REVIEW
garden beds, the red and yellow tulips, heavy with flowers,
seemed to lean upon the dusk. A grey cat, dragging its belly,
crept across the lawn, and a black one, its shadow, trailed
after. The sight of them, so intent and so quick, gave Bertha
a curious shiver.
" What creepy things cats are ! " she stammered, and she
turned away from the window and began walking up and
down. . . .
How strong the jonquils smelled in the warm room. Too
strong? Oh, no. And yet, as though overcome, she flung
down on a couch and pressed her hands to her eyes.
" I'm too happy — too happy ! " she murmured.
And she seemed to see on her eyelids the lovely pear
tree with its wide open blossoms as a symbol of her own life.
Really — really — she had everything. She was young.
Harry and she were as much in love as ever, and they got
on together splendidly and were really good pals. She had
an adorable baby. They didn't have to worry about money.
They had this absolutely satisfactory house and garden. And
friends — modern, thrilling friends, wi iters and painters and
poets or people keen on social questions — just the kind of
friends they wanted. And then there were books, and there
was music, and she had found a wonderful little dressmaker,
and they were going abroad in the summer, and their new
cook made the most superb omelettes. . . .
" I'm absurd. Absurd ! " She sat up; but she felt quite
dizzy, quite drunk. It must have been the spring.
Yes, it was the spring. Now she was so tired she could
not drag herself upstairs to dress.
A white dress, a string of jade beads, green shoes and
stockings. It wasn't intentional. She had thought of this
scheme hours before she stood at the drawing-room window.
Her petals rustled softly into the hall, and she kissed
Mrs. Norman Knight, who was taking off the most amusing
orange coat with a procession of black monkeys round the
hem and up the fronts.
"... Why ! Why ! Why is the middle class so stodgy — so
utterly without a sense of humour ! My dear, it's only by a
fluke that I am here at all — Norman being the protective fluke.
For my darling monkeys so upset the train that it rose to a
man and simply ate me with its eyes. Didn't laugh — wasn't
amused — that I should have loved. No, just stared — and
bored me through and through."
BLISS 113
" But the cream of it was," said Norman, pressing a large
tortoiseshell-rimmed monocle into his eye, " you don't mind
me telling this, Face, do you ?" (In their home and among their
friends they called each other Face and Mug.) " The cream
of it was when she, being full fed, turned to the woman beside
her and said : " Haven't you ever seen a monkey before? "
"Oh, yes! " Mrs. Norman Knight joined in the laughter.
" Wasn't that too absolutely creamy ? "
And a funnier thing still was that now her coat was off she
did look like a very intelligent monkey — who had even made
that yellow silk dress out of scraped banana skins. And her
amber ear-rings ; they were like little dangling nuts.
" This is a sad, sad fall ! " said Mug, pausing in front of
Little B's perambulator. " When the perambulator comes
into the hall " and he waved the rest of the quotation away.
fne bell rang. It was lean, pale Eddie Warren (as usual)
in a state of acute distress.
" It is the right house, isn't it? " he pleaded.
" Oh, I think so — I hope so," said Bertha brightly.
" I have had such a dreadful experience with a taxi-man ;
he was most sinister. I couldn't get him to stop. The more
I knocked and called the faster he went. And in the moon-
light this bizarre figure with the flattened head crouching over
the lit-tle wheel. . . ."
He shuddered, taking off an immense white silk scarf.
Bertha noticed that his socks were white, too — most charming.
" But how dreadful ! " she cried.
" Yes, it really, was," said Eddie, following her into the
drawing-room. " I saw myself driving through Eternity in a
timeless taxi."
He knew the Norman Knights. In fact, he was going to
write a play for N. K. when the theatre scheme came off.
"Well, Warren, how's the play?" said Norman Knight,
dropping his monocle and giving his eye a moment in which
to rise to the surface before it was screwed down again.
And Mrs. Norman Knight : " Oh, Mr. Warren, what happy
socks? "
" I am so glad you like them," said he, staring at his feet.
' They seem to have got so much whiter since the moon rose."
And he turned his lean sorrowful young face to Bertha.
" There is a moon, you know."
She wanted to cry : " I am sure there is — often — often ! "
He really was a most attractive person. But so was Face,
crouched before the fire in her banana skins, and so was Mug,
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ii4 THE ENGLISH REVIEW
smoking; a cigarette and saying as he flicked the ash : " Why
doth the bridegroom tarry?"
" There he is, now."
Bang went the front door open and shut. Harry shouted :
" Hullo, you people. Down in five minutes." And they
heard him swarm up the stairs. Bertha couldn't help smiling ;
she knew how he loved doing things at high pressure. What,
after all, did an extra five minutes matter? But he would
pretend to himself that they mattered beyond measure. And
then he would make a great point of coming into the drawing-
room, extravagantly cool and collected.
Harry had such a zest for life. Oh, how she appreciated
it in him. And his passion for fighting — for seeking in every-
thing that came up against him another test of his power and
of his courage — that, too, she understood. Even when it
made him, just occasionally, to other people, who didn't know
him well, a little ridiculous perhaps. . . . For there were
moments when he rushed into battle v/here no battle was. . . .
She talked and laughed and positively forgot until he had
come in (just as she had imagined) that Pearl Fulton had not
turned up.
" I wonder if Miss Fulton has forgotten? "
" I expect so," said Harry. " Is she on the 'phone? "
"Ah ! There's a taxi, now." And Bertha smiled with that
little air of proprietorship that she always assumed while her
women finds were new and mysterious. " She lives in taxis."
" She'll run to fat if she does," said Harry coolly, ringing
the bell for dinner. " Frightful danger for blond women."
Harry — don't," warned Bertha, laughing up at him.
Came another tiny moment, while they waited, laughing
and talking, just a trifle too much at their ease, a trifle too
unaware. And then Miss Fulton, all in silver, with a silver
fillet binding her pale blond hair, came in smiling, her head a
little on one side.
"Am I late?"
" No, not at all," said Bertha. " Come along." And she
took her arm and they moved into the dining room.
What was there in the touch of that cool arm that could
fan — fan — start blazing — blazing — the fire of bliss that Bertha
did not know what to do with ?
Miss Fulton did not look at her; but then she seldom
did look at people directly. Her heavy eyelids lay upon her
eyes and the strange half smile Came and went upon her lips
BLISS 115
as though she lived by listening rather than seeing. But
Bertha knew, suddenly, as if the longest, most intimate look
had passed between them — as if they had said to each other :
"You, too?" — that Pearl Fulton, stirring the beautiful red
soup in the grey plate, was feeling just what she was feeling.
And the others? Face and Mug, Eddie and Harry, their
spoons rising and falling — dabbling their lips with their
napkins, crumbling bread, fiddling with the forks and glasses
and talking.
" I met her at the Alpha show — the weirdest little person.
She'd not only cut off her hair, but she seemed to have taken
a dreadfully good snip off her legs and arms and her neck
and her poor little nose as well."
" Isn't she very liee with Michael Oat ? "
' The man who wrote ' Love in False Teeth '? "
" He wants to write a play for me. One act. One man.
Decides to commit suicide. Gives all the reasons why he
should and why he shouldn't. And just as he has made up his
mind either to do it or not to do it — curtain. Not half a bad
idea."
" What's he going to call it — ' Stomach Trouble ' ? "
" I think I've come across the same idea in a lit-tle French
review, quite unknown in England."
No, they didn't share it. They were dears — dears — and
she loved having them there, at her table, and giving them
delicious food and wine. In fact, she longed to tell them
how delightful they were, and what a decorative group they
made, how they seemed to set one another off and how they
reminded her of a play by Tchekof !
Harry was enjoying his dinner. It was part of his — well,
not his nature, exactly, and certainly not his pose — his — some-
thing or other — to talk about food and to glory in his " shame-
less passion for the white flesh of the lobster " and " the green
of pistachio ices — green and cold like the eyelids of Egyptian
dancers."
When he looked up at her and said : " Bertha, this is a very
admirable souffle1 e! " she almost could have wept with child-
like pleasure.
Oh, why did she feel so tender towards the whole world
to-night? Everything was good — was right. All that hap-
pened seemed to fill again her brimming cup of bliss.
And still, in the back of her mind, there was the pear tree.
It would be silver now, in the light of poor dear Eddie's moon,
silver as Miss Fulton, who sat there turning a tangerine in her
F 2
u6 THE ENGLISH REVIEW
slender ringers that were so pale, a light seemed to come from
them.
What she simply couldn't make out— what was miraculous
— was how she should have guessed Miss Fulton's mood so
exactly and so instantly. For she never doubted for a
moment that she was right, and yet what had she to go on ?
Less than nothing.
" I believe this does happen very, very rarely between
women. Never between men," thought Bertha. ' But while
I am making the coffee in the drawing-room perhaps she will
" give a sign.5 "
What she meant by that she did not know, and what would
happen after that she could not imagine.
While she thought like this she saw herself talking and
laughing. She had to talk because of her desire to laugh.
" I must laugh or die."
But when she noticed Face's funny little habit of tucking
something down the front of her bodice — as if she kept a tiny,
secret hoard of nuts there, too — Bertha had to dig her nails
into her hands — so as not to laugh too much.
It was over at last. And : "Come and see my new coffee
machine," said Bertha.
" We only have a new coffee machine once a fortnight,"
said Harry. Face took her arm this time; Miss Fulton bent
her head and followed after.
The fire had died down in the drawing-room to a red,
flickering " nest of baby phoenixes," said Face.
" Don't turn up the light for a moment. It is so lovely."
And down she crouched by the fire again. She was always
cold . . . "without her little red flannel jacket, of course,"
thought Bertha.
At that moment Miss Fulton "gave the sign."
" Have you a garden? " said the cool, sleepy voice.
This was so exquisite on her part that all Bertha could do
was to obey. She crossed the room, pulled the curtains apart,
and opened those long windows.
" There ! " she breathed.
And the two women stood side by side looking at the
slender, flowering tree. Although it was so still it seemed,
like the flame of a candle, to stretch up, to point, to quiver in
the bright air, to grow taller and taller as they gazed — almost
to touch the rim of the round, silver moon.
How long did they stand there? Both, as it were, caught
BiLISS 117
in that circle of unearthly light, understanding each other
perfectly, creatures of another world, and wondering what
they were to do in this one with all this blissful treasure that
burned in their bosoms and dropped, in silver flowers, from
their hair and hands ?
For ever — for a moment? And did Miss Fulton murmur :
"Yes. Just that." Or did Bertha dream it?
Then the light was snapped on and Face made the coffee
and Harry said : " My dear Mrs. Knight, don't ask me about
my baby, I never see her. I shan't feel the slightest interest
in her until she has a lover," and Mug took his eye out of the
conservatory for a moment and then put it under glass again
and Eddie Warren drank his coffee and set down the cup with
a face of anguish as though he had drunk and seen the spider.
" What I want to do is to give the young men a show.
I believe London is simply teeming with first-chop, unwritten
plays. What I want to say to 'em is : ' Here's the theatre.
Fire ahead.' "
" You know, my dear, I am going to decorate a room for
the Jacob Nathans. Oh, I am so tempted to do a fried-fish
scheme, with the backs of the chairs shaped like frying pans
and lovely chip potatoes embroidered all over the curtains."
' The trouble with our young writing men is that they are
still too romantic. You can't put out to sea without being
seasick and wanting a basin. Well, why won't they have the
courage of those basins?"
"A dreadful poem about a girl who was violated by a
beggar without a nose in a lit-tle wood. . . ."
Miss Fulton sank into the lowest, deepest chair and Harry
handed round the cigarettes.
From the way he stood in front of her shaking the silver
box and saying abruptly : " Egyptian ? Turkish ? Virginian ?
They're all mixed up," Bertha realised that she not only
bored him; he really disliked her. And she decided from
the way Miss Fulton said : " No, thank you, I won't smoke,"
that she felt it, too, and was hurt.
" Oh, Harry, don't dislike her. You are quite wrong about
Her. She's wonderful, wonderful. And, besides, how can
you feel so differentlv about someone who means so much to
me. I shall try to tell you when we are in bed to-night what
has been happening. What she and I have shared."
At those last words something strange and almost terrifying
darted into Bertha's mind. And this something blind and smil-
n8 THE ENGLISH REVIEW
ing whispered to her : " Soon these people will go. The house
will be quiet — quiet. The lights will be out. And you and
he will be alone together in the dark room — the warm bed. . . ."
She jumped up from her chair and ran over to the piano.
" What a pity someone does not play ! " she cried. " What
a pity somebody does not play."
For the first time in her life Bertha Young desired her
husband.
Oh, she'd loved him — she'd been in love with him, of
course, in every other way, but just not in that way. And,
equally, of course, she'd understood that he was different.
They'd discussed it so often. It had worried her dreadfully
at first to find that she was so cold, but after a time it had not
seemed to matter. They were so frank with each other —
such good pals. That was the best of being modern.
But now — ardently ! ardently ! The word ached in her
ardent body ! Was this what that feeling of bliss had been
leading up to? But then
"My dear," said Mrs. Norman Knight, "you know our
shame. We are the victims of time and train. We live in
Hampstead. It's been so nice."
" I'll come with you into the hall," said Bertha. " I loved
having you. But you must not miss the last train. That's
so awful, isn't it?"
"Have a whisky, Knight, before you go?" called Harry.
" No thanks, old chap."
Bertha squeezed his hand for that as she shook it.
" Goodnight, goodbye," she cried from the top step,
feeling that this self of hers was taking leave of them for ever.
When she got back into the drawing-room the others were
on the move.
"... Then you can come part of the way in my taxi."
" I shall be so thankful not to have to face another drive
alone after my dreadful experience."
"You can get a taxi at the rank just at the end of the
street. You won't have to walk more than a few yards."
" That's a comfort. I'll go and put on my coat."
Miss Fulton moved towards the hall and Bertha was
following when Harry almost pushed past.
" Let me help you."
Bertha knew that He was repenting his rudeness — she let
him go. What a boy he was in some ways — so impulsive — so
— simple.
And Eddie and she were left by the fire.
BLISS 119
" I wonder if you have seen Bilks' new poem called ' Table
d'Hdte,'" said Eddie softly. "It's so wonderful. In the
last Anthology. Have you got a copy ? I'd so like to show
it to you. It begins with an incredibly beautiful line : * Why
Must it Always be Tomato Soup? ' "
" Yes," said Bertha. And she moved noiselessly to a
table opposite the drawing-room door and Eddie glided noise-
lessly after her. She picked up the little book and gave it
to him ; they had not made a sound.
While he looked it up she turned her head towards the
hall. And she saw : . . . Harry with Miss Fulton's coat in his
arms and Miss Fulton with her back turned to him and her
head bent. He tossed the coat away, put his hands on her
shoulders and turned her violently to him. His lips said : " I
adore you," and Miss Fulton laid her moonbeam fingers on
his cheeks and smiled her sleepy smile. Harry's nostrils
quivered; his lips curled back in a hideous grin while he
whispered " To-morrow," and with her eyelids Miss Fulton
said " Yes."
" Here it is," said Eddie. " Why Must it Always be
Tomato Soup? It's so deeply true, don't you feel ? Tomato
soup is so dreadfully eternal."
" If you prefer," said Harry's voice, very loud, from the
hall, " I can 'phone you a cab to come to the door."
" Oh, no. It's not necessary," said Miss Fulton, and she
came up to Bertha and gave her the slender fingers to hold.
" Goodbye. Thank you so much."
" Goodbye," said Bertha.
Miss Fulton held her hand a moment longer.
" Your lovely pear tree ! " she murmured.
And then she was gone, with Eddie following, like the
black cat following the grey cat.
" I'll shut up shop," said Harry, extravagantly cool and
collected.
" Your lovely pear tree — pear tree — pear tree ! "
Bertha simply ran over to the long windows.
"Oh, what is going to happen now?" she cried.
But the pear tree was as lovely as ever and as full of
flower and as still.
v
The Modern State,
Internationalism, and War
By E. Belfort Bax
We are all acquainted with certain well-worn saws embody-
ing what counts for popular wisdom on the subject of " human
nature." Who does not know the wiseacre who will con-
fidently dispense his cheap and serviceable wisdom to you
to the effect that dogmatic religion is, and always will be,
necessary to keep the mass of men in order? The implica-
tion is, of course, that he, and possibly you, might do without
it, but that " human nature " in the lump (which is bad) re-
quires it. Then, again, there is our old acquaintance in dis-
cussions on Socialism,, who is never tired of repeating that
the stimulus of want, hunger, and necessity is imperative to
make the bulk of men do any .work at all, " human nature "
being always essentially lazy. Yet, again, we have the sapient
man of shrewd common sense, as he fancies himself, who lays
down the law to the effect that, as war always has been, so
it always will be, since war belongs to "human nature," and
disputes between States will be always liable to reach a point
at which a recourse to arms is inevitable.
Now, it is this last oracle with whom we propose to deal
on the present occasion. In investigating the truth or false-
hood of his pretensions it is necessary to cast a glance at the
origin and development of the structural forms of human
society, social and political, for when dtir popular philosopher
o'f " human nature " talks about war as being inevitable in
the future as in the past, he means war as between Nation-
States in the modern sense. Now he, like his colleagues in
the purveying of their "cheap and serviceable popular wisdom,
is, as a rule, indifferently grounded in anthropology and the
early. history of institutions. For the worthy person in ques-
tion, like his colleagues above-mentioned, the " human nature "
and institutions he has in mind are those he is familiar with
in the present day, or in the more or less recent history with
which he is superficially acquainted. So this our friend, who
is so confident in maintaining the thesis that a state of per-
petual peace among mankind is a chimera, does not refer for
THE MODERN STATE 121
the most part to civil war or commotions on questions of prin-
ciple, irrespective of racial or national boundaries (which
come under a different category), but to armed conflict be-
tween Nation- States in their capacity as such.
Now in discussing the question of the possibility of war
between Nation-States, as happens to-day, becoming obsolete,
it is necessary to go over what may be to many readers familiar
ground, and briefly re-consider the forms out of which such
war has evolved, and the general direction of social and
political evolution, in so far as it concerns the question of war
and peace.
The earliest form of organised human society, we need
scarcely remind the reader, is what is known as " tribal
society, a society based, that is, directly or indirecly on kin-
ship groups, on groups whose membership usually claim
descent from some common ancestor. The chief and most
constant divisions in tribal society (although not the only ones)
are those of the clan and the tribe. Now war as it obtained
in early society meant a conflict between rival clans, but as
the power of the larger unit of organisation, the tribe, grew
at the expense of the clans of which it consisted, war between
the clans as such gradually died out, ancj the tribe itself
became the war-waging unit as against other tribes. At a
later stage two or more tribes coalesced, always under the
notion of kinship, which might be real or fictitious, to form
what was known as a " people." Armed conflicts as between
the affiliated tribes of this people very soon ceased, and hence-
forth the war-waging unit became par excellence no longer
the tribe, but the union or confederacy of tribes (i.e., the
people) in its corporate capacity. (As the most familiar his-
torical illustration of a confederacy such as that spoken of,
under an assumed kinship bond, take the trite case of the
"people" or "children" of Israel.)
As civilisation advanced and gained the upper hand over
primitive barbaric society and settled conditions of agricul-
tural and of town life supervened, the city which grew up
round some natural stronghold became the localised centre
of the united tribes and henceforth the typical emblem of
these tribes, alike in peace and in war. With the rise of settled
communities and cities we enter the period of history pro-
perly so called. It is the period far excellence of indi-
vidualisation, first of all of peoples themselves, and very
much later of the individual men composing these peoples.
Primitive barbaric society was and is very much alike in
122 THE ENGLISH REVIEW
essentials all over the world. The main differentiation of the
characteristics of one race from another begins with civilisa-
tion and history. This, however, by the way. Now history
proper takes its rise with the civilisations of Egypt and of
Western Asia. In dealing with this ancient history we often
speak of Empires. Babylonia, Assyria, Persia, Egypt, are
referred to as Empires. But it would be a mistake to regard
these so-called Empires as bearing any close analogy to the
Nation-State of modern times. They were essentially more
or less loose confederacies of cities under an over-lordship,
whose powers were mainly exercised in the direction of mili-
tary service and of fiscal subsidies usually for war purposes.
The civil and domestic life of each city and district was
largely autonomous, the central over-lordship making its
power little, if at all, felt in local affairs. Hence there was
no feeling of national unity and national patriotism as we
know it to-day and in recent times. Even in war it was for
the most part mere force exercised by the over-lordship of
the dominant city or district which held together as soldier-
slaves the greater part of the people of Babylonia, Assyria,
or Persia. These Empires consisted at best of loose and un-
stable component elements, and at worst of conquered or half -
conquered cities and districts with their populations. There
was nowhere any feeling of national unity in the modern
sense.
With the rise and rapid development of Greece and its
colonies we have, the pure type of the ancient city at its best,
and in Greece and its colonies war, when it took place, was
a war between cities, mostly between Greek cities. The Greek
world, although it had a sentiment of community as against
the barbarian, never had it in the sense of political cohesion.
We see this utter want of politico-national sentiment in a
modern sense in the greatest enterprise in which the Greek-
speaking world was ever engaged in common, to wit, the
Persian wars.
Rome itself, like all the other cities of the ancient world,
originated in a small tribal confederacy. Through conquest
and the formation of a city confederacy throughout Italy, of
which Rome was the head, the foundation of the future world-
Empire was laid. But this Empire, which assumed more and
more the character of a bureaucratic organisation, and which
was compounded of all tribes, kindreds, and peoples, had,
if possible, less real unity of national sentiment than even
those that had preceded it. The much-boasted Roman citl
THE MODERN STATE 123
zenship, at first the sign of a dominant caste, then a mere
commercial value, was finally levelled, under Caracalla, to
include all the subjects of the Empire, and soon ceased to
have any significance whatever.
With the break-up of the Roman Empire and the bar-
barian invasions, the world as known to history again resolved
itself into a congeries, or, at best, a very loosely connected
system, of rural manors, with the surviving cities of the
Empire now become autonomous centres. Afterwards, in the
later Middle Ages, when the new mediaeval townships arose,
they likewise assumed the form of partially or wholly inde-
pendent civic communities. In any case their allegiance was,
as a rule, owed to an immediate overlord and not to any
national government. Their connection with a larger govern-
mental system, whether that of the king, as in France or
England, or of the Empire, as in Central Europe, was in the
former case, according to modern ideas, comparatively slight,
and in the latter almost purely nominal.
But with the close of the Middle Ages, with the periods
known as the Renaissance and the Reformation, the modern
nation began to consolidate itself. The manorial and feudal
system broke down, and power became centralised in the
hands of the king and his council. Local freedoms and inde-
pendence weakened, and in many cases lapsed, before the
power of the new Nation- State with its national patriotic
sentiment. From this time forward baronial wars, wars be-
tween local communities and their heads, or between one
township and another, gave place, in some countries gradually
and in others more suddenly, to wars between the recently
centralised national States. The Nation-State of modern
times, with its racial basis, real or assumed, now became the
war-waging unit. This is the stage which still continues.
Modern patriotism represents its ideological expression. The
appeal is now made not to a man's enthusiasm for his feudal
lord, or his native borough, or his county, or any other local
division, but to his country, to his enthusiasm for the Nation-
State into which he happens to have been born.
Yet, in spite of the apparent strength of the Nation-State,
it is not difficult to see, and the present war has emphasised
the point in many directions, that we are on the eve of another
great change in the unit of political power, a corresponding
change to those which gave rise to the domination of the tribe
over its component clans, of the "people " over the "tribe,"
of the city over the rural communities, whether in ancient or
. f* 2
124 THE ENGLISH REVIEW
mediaeval times, of the feudal prince over the barons and
knights who owed him allegiance, and, lastly, of the king and
his council as representing the earlier form of the modern
Nation-State we see in its fully-developed form to-day; in
short, of the larger and more comprehensive unit over the
lesser ones embraced by it. Now similar corresponding
causes are operating under our very eyes, which point to the
supersession of the Nation by the International or
perhaps better, the Supernation, of the Nation- State
by the International Commonwealth, as the ultimate
arbiter and the final basis of power. Everywhere we hear
the talk of a Commonwealth at least of the Allied Entente
Nations. The causes of this are complex in their nature.
Economical, social, political, intellectual conditions of
civilised mankind are rapidly tending to become incompatible
with the absoluteness of the Nation-State as the unit of power.
But once the unit of power, to which is the supreme appeal,
becomes International, and it is clear that the day of inter-
necine warfare between the nations constituting the Inter-
national Commonwealth must come to an end, just as inter-
tribal warfare came to an end with the power of the tribal
confederacy or " people," over the tribes constituting it, ; or
the internecine warfare of feudal manors or mediaeval town-
ships came to an end with the rise and development of the
modern Nation-State.
But will the new International Commonwealth upon which
devolves the sceptre of ultimate power formerly held by the
Nation-State be a war-waging unit of power? This is im-
possible in proportion as it absorbs the whole of civilisation,
since there would be no separate power that could compete
with it, just as it would be impossible, say, for Liverpool or
any other single town or conceivable combination of towns
to wage war on the National Government of England. Hence
it is clear that with the advent, even in a partial form, of the
International Commonwealth spoken of, we shall see at the
very least the waning possibility of international war, and
with its complete development the final impossibility and
ultimate extinction of international war as such. Just as
administrative regulation in the Nation-State has superseded
armed conflict between the communities comprised within
that State, so it will be, mutatis mutandis, in the future with
the International Commonwealth. In other words, in the
necessary course of political development, war must end.
Q.E.D.:
THE MODERN STATE 125
Once more. It is clear that the causes of conflict within
a world-commonwealth such as that spoken of in the first part
of this article, in so far as it was established on a Socialist
basis, could not arise out of economic rivalry, or, indeed, from
any directly economic cause. Hence, not merely would the
absorption of present existent Nation-States in a new uni-
versal over-Power, by the very constitution of such a Power,
do away with the possibility of armed conflict, just as the
modern Nation-State in a similar way abolished the possi-
bility of armed conflict between the town and provinces con-
tained within it; but the main causes of dispute would be
altogether removed. The world-Power of the future, there-
fore, would necessarily differ in every important respect from
the Nation-State of to-day. It behoves us, nevertheless, as
practical persons living to-day to consider the question of the
ethical claim of the modern Nation-State upon the communi-
ties and individual human beings constituting it.
There is no doubt a strong tendency at this moment, which
the war has accentuated, to regard the State, the repository
of the material power of the Nation, as the highest object of
devotion to those coming under it. Even with the followers
of Auguste Comte, who are supposed to claim in a special
manner Humanity, the Grand Eire Supreme, as the supreme
object of all worship and endeavour, are swept into the current
of Nation- State worshippers with whom humanity as a whole
tends to become a mere pious idea, an ornamental flourish,
behind the object of their practical devotion, to wit, the
modern Nation-State.
But the claim of the State, the actual governing power of
the community, to any unconditional homage or loyalty, has
been of late seriously impugned, and that by certain academic
writers who would, so far as I am aware, hardly regard them-
selves as Socialists, and certainly who do not belong to any
Socialist organisation. Socialists, of course, have always
pointed out the distinction between the existing State, its
power wielded by a governing class and in class interests,
and the directive organ of a Socialist commonwealth. But,
apart from this, and even with some Socialists, the claim of
the Nation-State to supreme devotional sacrifice from its own
section of mankind has passed unchallenged. It is too often
forgotten, though lately pointed out by more than one writer,
that even from the present bourgeois point of view, there are
other competing social forms and groupings possibly claim-
ing the allegiance of the individual which by "no means
126 THE ENGLISH REVIEW
coincide with the Nation-State. The filaments of Inter-
nationalism, conscious and unconscious, have become more
and more numerous during the last two generations. These
filaments are economical, political, intellectual, and social.
Those of an economic nature — postal systems, railway sys-
tems, etc., etc. — do not directly concern us here. Although
not without their influence on the foundations of the Inter-
nationalism of the future, they do not immediately affect the
question of the ethical bond between the individual and the
Nation-State info which he has been born. There are, how-
ever, other forms of organisation which do most distinctly
challenge the supremacy of the Nation- State as the object
of individual allegiance, quite apart from the remoter ideal
of humanity as the Grand Eire Supreme. There is, for in-
stance, what we may term the socio-economic filaments which
bind a man to his class, and through his class, and even
through the economic section of the class to which he belongs,
to his trade union as well as to the organisations embodying
the principles of Trade Unionism throughout the world.
Then, again, there are other filaments based not on any formal
organisation, but on sympathetic interests and community of
ideas such as find their expression in ordinary times in inter-
national congresses of science, philosophy, or what not. All
these things, interests, and objects of allegiance, overlapping
the Nation-State with its ideal interest of national patriotism,
may easily come into conflict with the latter. As has been
recently insisted upon by the new school of academic writers
above referred to, a man is a member not only of his Nation-
State, but conceivably of other groupings of human society.
Hence his Nation-State can by no means claim his undivided
allegiance.
The above-indicated filaments tending to draw off the
inclusive allegiance of the reflecting individual from the mere
patriotic idea as such, do so in a partial and more or less
unconscious manner. It is only in and through an ideal that
is not merely political, and not merely special in other direc-
tions, but that embraces all human interests, of which ideal
Internationalism is of the very essence, that the other ideal
of national patriotism is really transcended. Now this ideal
is undoubtedly present in the notion of an International
Socialist Commonwealth. The conceptions, good in them-
selves, underlying working-class organisation as existing in
our present bourgeois society, not less than those of the or-
ganisation of intellectual aims, are insufficient when not based
upon the reorganisation of the economic structure of society
THE MODERN STATE 127
by the communisation of the material conditions of life, and
cemented by the recognition of an International Common-
wealth as the supreme object of allegiance. In the latter
alone can the old ideal of the Nation-State as supreme be
transcended.
This ideal is obviously International in a different sense
from that in which science, or art, or the " republic of letters "
(to use the old expression), can be said to be international.
These latter are only international in a special and negative
sense. As before said, they are not international in prin-
ciple— i.e., in a positive sense. Since the rise of national
States, the modern Socialist Party for the first time in history
has proclaimed Internationalism as a principle. The modern
Nation-State, from its first appearance in human affairs, has
tended to draw all things into its compass. Its political par-
ties, Liberal or Conservative, have been national parties, its
economic interests have been national interests, its religion,
at least so far as it has been Protestant, and often apart from
this, has been a national religion. The Socialist Party alone
has proclaimed itself international as a party.
During the Middle Ages, when national States in the
modern sense did not obtain, there also existed what, for want
of a better word, we may term an international organisation
and movement as such, to wit, the Catholic Church. But the
rise of the modern Nation struck it its death-blow in its old
form. In the form in which it recovered itself after what is
known as the Counter-Reformation it was no longer the same.
While nominally keeping up its old international tradition,
its interests have led it more and more to pander to national
prejudices on occasion. This has been noticeable during the
present war. The wealth which the Papal Chair, and the
Catholic Church organisation generally, derives from portions
of Germany, and more especially from Austria, has "caused
the Roman Curia to side largely with the Central Powers in
the present struggle. Modern Catholicism has, therefore,
ceased to be a disinterested international factor in human
affairs. Its attitude towards modern Nation-States is dictated
by its own material interests.
Up to now, then, during a period of the supremacy of
the Nation-State as the incarnation of power and the supreme
object of devotion of all those born under it, the Human or
International point of view was not represented till the rise
of modern Socialism. The practical breakdown, for the time
being, of the international idea by the defection of a con-
siderable section of the leaders of the German Social Demo-
128 THE ENGLISH REVIEW
cratic Party, though it cannot be regarded otherwise than as
a serious check, by no means signifies the defeat of Inter-
nationalism, as some writers on the war would like to repre-
sent it. The events of the war, though on one side they may
have helped to strengthen Nationalism, have on another side
distinctly helped to lay the foundation of a new Inter-
nationalism as forming part of the Socialist ideal in a manner
never known before. The Russian Revolution has distinctly
brought this fact into prominence. With the advent of the
first Russian Revolutionary Government and the forces be-
hind it to power, we see for the first time in the world's history
the attempt officially made to subordinate national interests to
international morality. This is of very great significance,
however much we may, as I think legitimately, criticise the
particular applications of these principles of international
ethics made by certain leaders of the Russian Revolution to
the existing situation. The general formulation of principles
is excellent, but, like all abstract formulae, they are applicable
to real conditions only, " other things equal." They pre-
suppose, that is, free, mutually respecting States ; but where
an aggressive Power is in question they cease to apply. Just
as in civil life the liberty of the individual recognised as the
basis of modern civil polity is recognised as only operative
for the unaggressive individual. It does not apply to the
aggressive individual — i.e., the criminal — the condition of
civil polity having been broken by him.
So it is with States in international polity. The
ethical conditions of international polity cease to exist for the
State which by its own act has placed itself outside them.
If coercion is right in the case of a criminal individual, it is
right in the case of a criminal State. This is a point that
many of our Russian friends, even of the first period of the
Revolution, seemed to forget. But making all allowance for
errors due to the attempt to apply general ethical formulae
in a hard-and-fast manner without regard to the logic of facts,
it remains an epoch-making event in human history when a
great modern nation like the Russian, dared, in the midst of
a still bourgeois world, to proclaim the Socialist principle of
international ethics, rather than national interest, as the basis
of its foreign policy. So far as it goes, this is a significant
symptom of the beginning of the change from the supremacy,
material and ideal, of the Nation-State to that of the universal
Commonwealth of Nations — from Nationalism to Interna-
tionalism or Snpernationalism.
A Recollection of President Wilson
By Edith G. Reicl
At one of our relaxed moments this autumn I was sitting with
three or four old friends in my long drawing-room. It was
late in the afternoon— the tea hour, when the heavy curtains
had been drawn, the fire lighted, and, though Hoover's card
stuck in the window, there was enough food for comfort with
consistency. Our thoughts and voices had dropped to the
point of fatigue when someone remarked that Sargent was
painting a portrait of Mr. Wilson. My memory went down
the long years, meeting him gently, with a glow of the heart
here and there, hearing his voice, remembering his vivid
thoughts, until I came to the moment when I first consciously
saw him. It was like taking up an old daguerreotype, and I
wondered how Sargent's late portrait would compare with my
early mental picture. Long I stayed with my friend that
afternoon — long after the others had gone and my fire had
smouldered. Would Mr. Sargent have the realising imagina-
tion to see back to the beginning and follow the thread of
his life until it brought him up to the man of to-day? Cer-
tainly, if Mr. Sargent catches the spirit of his subject, the
portrait will but emphasise the dominant note that was struck
in his youth; for there has been a singular continuity in the
life of our President. In the ideals and purposes of his life
there has been no variableness, neither shadow of turning.
The tall young fellow, who carried his body with a certain
diffident courtesy, never physically treading on your toes, was
free mentally — there he led. I recall him as he came up, a
graduate student, to the Johns Hopkins University, doubtless
poorly equipped with this world's goods, but- too wholesome
for that to matter.
Nothing and nobody in those early days could hold Mr.
Wilson long from his life's quest. His spiritual and mental
impulses were, in a sense, inspirations, and would sweep on
past and over minor matters. He had not that quality so
lauded by Americans — the quality of push — he was too
scholarly for that ; but there was a tremendous momentum in
this young man that carried him from a simple student, with
a very small haversack on his back, his assets in his brain
i3o THE ENGLISH REVIEW
— carried him to the presidency of Princeton, to fight for the
democracy of opportunity; to the governorship of New Jersey,
to force just government; to the presidency of the United
States, to hold steadily above a distracted world the scales of
universal justice. As the smallness of his student's room
mattered not at all, provided he could think and write, so
the bigness of the White House, if he keep true to himself,
is merely a vantage ground from which to do his work for
humanity.
My daguerreotype shows a tall young man, whose clothes
— one has to mention his clothes — were put on with so ob-
vious a desire to show due respect to the function that he
was attending, with so little thought for himself. He would
never have done for a tailor's advertisement ; but, though his
clothes were too big for him, he was immeasurably too big
for his clothes. That Georgia tailor proved so obviously that
no amount of disregard to the anatomy of his victim could
matter in the very least. Mr. Wilson was — he simply was.
His kindly, humorous, intellectual face, so young, but so full
of power ; his graciousness of manner, so full of consideration
and with so little of condescension, showed plainly the hall-
marks of his ancestry, Southern, Scotch, Irish, American —
he looked them all : Southern, by those dreadful clothes and
gentle manners; Scotch, by stiff integrity; Irish, by his
humour; and American, in being at once full of idealism and
of practical common sense.
Our acquaintance warmed into friendship, strange to say,
at one of those functions devised, I believe, to show how
cowed can become the spirit of man, how brave the spirit of
woman — a big evening reception. Women ordained them,
men attend them, because of some woman. We had been
squeezed to the very wall of our hostess's pretty drawing-
room and sank upon some mercifully left-over seats. The
centre of the room had become an arena, where the odds
were up as to whether the untrained gentlemen waiters could
successfully balance plates of olio, broiled oysters, and
chicken croquettes, and carry them deftly over the heads
of the company, finally depositing them, charged with their
perilous stuff, into the hands of their chosen fair ones. We,
from our cosy corner, watched with keenest interest the
heroes and heroines of this, to me, memorable evening. The
company became merelv a pageant for our delight. We won-
dered what it was all about — whether the people had food at
home, that they should struggle and suffer for it like that.
A RECOLLECTION OF PRESIDENT WILSON 131
We were both of us young then and wished to be very wise —
I, gay, arrogant, undisciplined ; he, very humble, for he was
already in harness, and his fresh, creative mind bowed to
wisdom. He studied his premises and weighed his conclu-
sions. But the trivial only held him as the lightest of surface
comedies; he quickly cut through them to the great problems
of past, present, and future. The unessential held him hardly
at all; but, because of his humour, his talk was never pon-
derous ; and also because of a certain vitalising quality that
was his in a degree I have never known in any other person.
He was subjective only inasmuch as he minded your blame
and cared for your praise ; for the rest, he was purely objective.
The big problems of humanity consumed him; they were so
much bigger than himself that he forgot himself. Never in
the world was it truer of anyone than of him that he had a
vision, but that he kept his feet on the ground ; and that makes
the order of person who arrives and carries others with him.
Mr. Wilson was not an individualist. It was not for the
love of one child, but for the love of all children, that their
problems concerned him. Not the problem of one favoured
and dear youth, but the problems of all youth, fired him; not
the development of the South alone, but the development of
his entire country, absorbed him. He saw things in large pro-
portions, and his constructive imagination was not that of the
adventurer or even the explorer; it was that of the pioneer,
with the pioneer's dauntless courage — but caution. Beyond
the felled forest and cut paths and dangers overcome he saw
peaceful homes, and thrifty farms, and simple, unsophisticated
schools, and spires of little churches.
From early youth he had in his mind the ardent desire
to show to his country what he read in the motives, and accom-
plishments, and defeats of the Civil War. Southern by birth
and breeding, he was never provincial — there was no muddling
of mind and heart. He loved his country from east to west,
from north to south, and looked out with clear eyes to the
universal problems of the United States. A democratic
University was his ideal. He felt that knowledge led to wis-
dom, and wisdom to righteousness ; and that was a road which
all who would should be able to take without handicap ; and
so, with a carelessness of self-interest that was simply amazing
he struck mighty blows, that there should be no sign " Private
Property " marked over this great highway. Only apparently
was he defeated, for his strokes are still echoing and every
college in the land has stopped and listened.
i32 THE ENGLISH REVIEW
I must mention one quality that told for peace and comfort
in small matters, and will be of inestimable benefit in great
matters — his consideration for the people about him. He had
a sweet tolerance, a kindly courtesy. He made few personal
demands. He was one of the few great men I have known
that you could forget if you were in the house with him; for,
though his time was not yours, he did not expect yours to be
his. " Live and let live " was his motto.
In the delineation of character it is perhaps well to elimi-
nate your ' buts." You generally hear that someone is a fine
fellow — but. I have looked well to my " buts," and I have
found them negligible. Mr. Wilson has, perhaps, too great
confidence in his fellow man. It is as difficult for our Presi-
dent to believe a man a liar as it is for our late President to
believe one truthful. Nevertheless, if he sometimes fails to
understand the individual, he understands that more subtle
thing— the personality of the mass.
The years that are past — are any years past ? The promise
that we give in our youth, are we not bound to fulfil ? I lay
my daguerreotype aside. My fire is spent to a mass of glow-
ing embers ; so the night will come and with it the dead ashes,
but they will serve to warm another flame. Around this
hearth many friends have gathered — most of them with some
quality that has made their lives at least not negligible. Mr.
Wilson was one of them, and he made us see him as I have
depicted him. He struck a note that we all heeded ; he showed
us a light that we are following. If we have so lived and
spoken that we have become to people an ideal, we must con-
tinue the character to the very end ; the rights and the wrongs
of it must be settled in another world ; we have given a promise
and incurred a debt.
The impression Mr. Wilson made upon his friends he has
made upon the nation. To be the mind, and heart, and soul
inarticulate of a nation is a great and lonely task. God help
him.
The All-Highest
By Edward Garnett
The All-Highest, with a sheet of note-paper in his gloved
hand, opened the polished door of his cabinet de travail, shut
it, and passed down the silent saloon. His look was fixed,
his walk was indecisive. Suddenly he arrested his steps,
folded his right arm on his breast, and stood there, drawing
himself up while he surveyed his Imperial figure gazing back
at him from the great gilt mirror that hung on the further
wall of the saloon.
Pellucid light fell upon the mirror, streaming through the
open portholes, through which he could see a breadth of calm,
sunlit sea and the line of the cloudless horizon. The saloon
itself with its walnut panelling inlaid with the Imperial eagle
in ebony plaques, its green silk hangings, bronze lamps, and
the great silver bowl full of roses that stood in the centre
of the long table, was empty save for that silent, updrawn
figure intently regarding itself. On rising the All-Highest
had dressed himself as usual in a yachting suit of blue serge,
white-braided, with naval cap and tan shoes ; but after lunch,
while sitting at his desk staring at the lines of unfinished,
erased sentences, he had thrown down the quill on the blot-
ting-pad, and ringing for his valet had ordered him to lay
out his favourite uniform as Colonel of the First Regiment
of Guards. In uniform the War Lord had ever felt his
spirit quickened, his speech sharpened, his bearing dignified.
And now from that waiting image in the glass, with the Order
of the Black Eagle gleaming on its breast, he sought the
answer to his halting indecision. Should he or should he
not, flash the signal of war?
The mine was laid. There on his bureau, hidden under
a dozen confidential reports from the European capitals, lay
the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia — ready. Nobody in the
Wilhelmstrasse, not the Chancellor nor Herr von Jagow, yet
divined its existence. The All-Highest had concerted it
secretly with the high Austrian nobles — this determination to
roll Serbia in the dust in revenge for the assassination of Sara-
jevo. The war eagles had gathered for the prey. The
i34 THE ENGLISH REVIEW
Central Empires were ready. Should he launch the thunder-
bolt? Peace or war was in his — the All-Highest' s — hands.
The All-Highest threw back his head and saw the image
in the glass repeating the gesture, challenging with keen
falcon eye all who might dare to question his will. A wave
of elation shot through the All-Highest's volatile soul. He
had sought the mirror to see how he appeared in the eyes of
men, and his reflection had given him belief in himself ! The
Royal actor's lips parted in exultation as he scanned his own
severe, haughty pose of majesty. There, surely, was the
Man!
His faith was his Hohenzollern glory. All else he
doubted. His will, his Imperial purpose, his wreathing his
own brows with the laurels of his Hohenzollern ancestors,
his declarations of " the Emperor's word," of himself as
" God's Vice-Regent upon earth," and " the Destiny of his
House," all these were as flowing theatrical robes in which
he wrapped his own instability. And yet, beneath his passion
for the limelight in which his vanity postured, lay the arro-
gant craft of the Prussian official. But, despite all his sabre-
rattlings, the All-Highest knew that no warrior was he ! At
parades, reviews, regimental banquets, yes ! when his officers
raised their glasses, shouting " Hoch! der Kaiser!" — then,
indeed, he felt in his actor's soul that he was their War Lord,
that he must some day lead the thundering squadron on the
battlefield. But when night came and he was alone he re-
coiled from war and its bloody harvest of agony, disease,
death. Truly, sincerely might he say that he had kept his
people and Europe at peace.
But now for three years he had watched with growing
distrust the tide of war-like feeling swelling, mounting fer-
vently in the German breast. He had striven to keep it in
check, not to be borne away lightly on the Wrar Party's tur-
bulent flood. And what was his guerdon? Hostile whisper-
ings at his elbow, voices of dark disbelief everywhere, nay,
even of veiled derision to his face. He, the All-Highest,
was sneered at, accused of vacillating indecision. He who
had never ceased working to establish the Fatherland's power
over land and sea ! He had ground his teeth in mortification.
The voices had stabbed his vanity to the quick. He who had
sworn that men should yet see and applaud him as Hero-
King ! For desire for applause was still, as ever, the pivot
of his being.
And yesterday the wound to his darling self-love had
THE ALL-HIGHEST 135
been laid bare by the assassin's knife. The sanctity of the
Royal person, the Kingship by the grace of God, the Divine
Right of the Ruler, all had been struck at at Sarajevo. After
his first wrathful incredulity the All-Highest had masked in
icy calmness the deep stab, the laceration. He had seen in
a flash his opportunity to be in the centre of the world picture.
As conqueror with his legions ! to move with and hear the
plaudits of the whole German people ! They should see him
as their defender, as Imperator Victor ! His left, impotent
hand sought the hilt of his sword as he murmured to himself
his regimental watchword : " The dry powder and the sharp
sword! Huzza for our object! Let us banish pessimists
from our midst ! "
Suddenly he started. A seagull circling round the yacht,
close to the porthole, had emitted a melancholy, raucous cry.
Was it an omen? The All-Highest frowned disdainfully,
and lo ! a sombre, tragic shadow darkened the face in the
mirror. It spoke to the Royal actor's sense of the Kingship's
never-finished, unending toils and labours, of the Monarch's
isolation, of his responsibility before God — for war. The
words " Before God, I do not will it ! " issued slowly from
his parted lips, and the image, too, lowered its head in solemn
acquiescence. .War? The All-Highest shut his eyes, and
in his lively fancy floated again his old vision of a great
battlefield, another Sedan, littered with thousands of corpses,
of men dying convulsed, amidst broken cannons, caissons,
with groups of captured prisoners, while he, the War Lord,
came riding slowly with his staff of Generals, gazing sternly
from his visor upon the field of carnage. " Before God, I
do not will it," he protested, feeling that he was the centre
of that terrible, yet glorious scene; and a mysterious sense
of Fate seemed to swell in his heart as he heard the solemn
German battle hymn float over the field, from all his field-
grey legions. Often he had repelled that tempting picture
in former years, yet now his words, " I do not will it," seemed
to lift the burden of responsibility from the Imperial actor's
heart. What if God willed it? And suddenly the All-
Highest felt himself impelled onward by a mysterious inner
force. Was it not Destiny, his Destiny? What was to be
would be. Was it not his task to lead the German people
through the flame and smoke of battle to their world destiny?
A phrase from one of his speeches flashed into his volatile
mind, " We are the salt of the earth. We must show our-
selves worthy of our great destiny ! " He smiled craftily,
136 THE ENGLISH REVIEW
the yvmites of the eyes of the image gleamed in the mirror,
his mouth was contorted affectedly beneath his thick mous-
tache. Raising his gloved hand imperiously the Royal actor
cried : u Ein frischer, frdhlicher Krieg! " And, to himself,
as he tripped away from the mirror with mincing, king- like
steps, the All-Highest repeated triumphantly : " This time
none of them will be able to accuse me of indecision ! "
Did, indeed, the destinies of the civilised world, the fate
of great Empires, the misery of millions of helpless families,
the death and agony of tens of millions of brave men who
had no quarrel with one another; did, indeed, the avalanche
of destruction and ruin, and the vast catastrophe to European
civilisation, hang at the mercy of this little man mouthing
and posturing before the mirror on the Imperial yacht? And
at the mercy of his rival conspirator, the feeble, obstinate
little man in Petrograd, walled in by his ring of crafty, retro-
grade politicians, obsessed by his inherited autocratic
myopia ?
Would the great avalanche have fallen upon Europe
without the work of these little men's hands in releasing it?
Did the bloody carnage of a thousand battlefields hang
upon the one's vanity and the other's irresolution?
The finger of Fate has turned bloody page after page.
And pages as dreadful lie before us.
March 25th, ipiS.
McCudden, the Airman V.C.
By Mrs. Alec-Tweedie
Only a boy. A dapper little person, all smiles and sim-
plicity. Just a jolly, healthy-minded boy of twenty-three,
who left school at thirteen to become a drummer-boy in the
Royal Engineers, where his elder brother was a sergeant.
Later, that brother went into the Flying Corps as a
mechanic, and in 19 13 Jimmy, or, as his friends called him,
Mac" followed him, also as a mechanic, going out to
France with the squadron early in the war.
It seems impossible to think he was actually dead in
France on Tuesday afternoon (July 9th), he, the boy who had
been smiling in my room on Tuesday morning as proud as
Punch of the Major's Crown he had just had fixed to his
shoulder. Dead — not from fighting a Hun — for this most
experienced flyer and fighter met his death through an acci-
dent, only a simple accident. He, the boy covered with
ribbons, killed as any novice might have been killed.
He had landed in France. Reported himself at Head-
quarters, and went off again, apparently in the same machine,
to join the squadron to which he had just been appointed
Major. He had hardly risen from the ground before the
spectators noticed something was wrong. The machine
swerved, flew low, and behold, caught in some trees,
to be followed by a crash. Poor McCudden was dragged
out dangerously hurt and insensible, to die that evening at
eight o'clock on French soil, the scene of his former glories,
but not chasing the enemy as he wTould have wished, alas ! He
was buried as a Catholic, and lies not far from so many of his
former triumphs — notably in the winter of 191 7-8.
Asking him, a few weeks ago, why he was so anxious to
get back to France, and was working against all obstacles to
do so, he replied " Well, you see, I have only brought down
fifty-seven Huns — and perhaps twenty or thirty more not
properly authenticated — and Richthofen got eighty-one ; so I
Must get back and outstrip his record. It's ho good saying
Germans can't fight, they can. I know all about every fight
138 THE ENGLISH REVIEW
I ever had, and at least five first-class German pilots I can
remember."
And what was the origin of McCudden's success? Hero
worship. He adored his elder brother. That brother in-
fluenced his life. He told young Mac what was worth doing
was worth doing well. Inspired him with the right kind of
ambition, the ambition to attain but not at the expense of
others, merely by his own thoroughness, and seizing the right
opportunity. And so the future V.C. climbed slowly from
bugler boy to be a great pioneer air fighter. He much re-
gretted his scanty schooling, and said "I always wish I had had
the advantage of a public school. After I joined the officers'
mess I often felt ill at ease when chaps were talking about
things I didn't understand." And yet his thoroughness was
such that every French name and every Englishman's name in
his MS. is correctly spelt, and, beyond a few grammatical
mistakes, it wants little or no editing. It is a plain tale
plainly told by its own hero, who did not even know he was
the hero. And yet McCudden fought well-nigh 200 aerial
fights, and twice actually downed four Huns in a day, and
once got three single-seaters in twenty minutes. He was the
son of an old fighter, for his father has had twenty-nine years'
service in the Army and, like two of his sons, won medals
himself. A fine family record.
McCudden has written a book. I wish I could quote
from the MS. before me, but the public will have to wait a
little for this intensely interesting human document. This
book is a wonderful production. He came to me some
weeks ago, with an introduction from my son, to ask how
many words would be wanted, etc. " Sixty to eighty
thousand " was my reply. He looked aghast — not having the
slightest idea how many he had scribbled in pencil, on both
sides of the page, in a sort of copy-book. It was hardly an
author's manuscript, but the very simplicity of the style of that
1,000 words was its charm, and showed his capacity for doing
a thoroughly readable book describing five years in the Royal
Flying Corps from the bottom rung to the top pinnacle.
Back to Scotland he went to do more, and actually
managed to write 40,000 in three weeks, in spite of his daily
instructing for fighting pilots. One evening (June 10th) he
walked in again, about 10.30 p.m., looking very red and sun-
burnt, with the precious new material under his arm. He
Had left Scotland that afternoon, and had flown 400 miles
in two Hours and three quarters, had had a bath and some
McCUDDEN, THE AIRMAN V.C. 139
food and explained that the wind, luckily a following one
which allowed 140 miles an hour, had caught his face and the
sun had scorched it.
" There," he said, " are 40,000 words more, and written in
pencil on one side of the paper only, and I've been its aerial
postman," with a merry laugh. He had wonderful eyes ; the
dark blue iris seemed to cover the entire pupil, and his long
eye-lashes were darker than his fair hair. He was a good-
looking boy, but what really impressed one more was his
straight-forward way, thoroughness, good calm common sense,
his honesty of purpose and his youthful joy of life. There
was no swank about him. He had simple manners, and
spoke in a simple way with true sportsmanlike spirit.
" I'm sure now the war will be a long one," he said. " I
don't intend to take any unnecessary risks with dashing stunts,
I mean to kill Huns, but at my own time; I won't bustle or
do anything foolish like my brother who was killed sixteen
weeks ago." And yet he was killed in an accident.
My last recollection of him — and that one only a few
hours before he was killed — was a smiling young man rushing
off to his waiting taxi " as I've a crowd of little odds and ends
to do before I pick up my machine, but I'll be back in three
months, and hope my book will be out before then. I'll send
you a line from France to-morrow."
This was the third son lost in the Air Force by those
splendid Irish parents, and the loss of McCudden, V.C, is not
only their loss but a loss to tKe nation.
The Tragedy of Ireland
By Merlin
It is difficult to say anything about Ireland, because in the
atmosphere of plot, counter-plot and conspiracy reason
abdicates, and what remains is prejudice. In England men
believe — they do not know, because only one Englishman
in ten thousand takes the trouble to find out the true situation
in Ireland, reads Irish newspapers, etc. — that Sinn Fein is
in active collusion with the enemy; that the Irish are, there-
fore, traitors; that martial law is, consequently, the only
remedy; and i - truth the state of Ireland is well-nigh despe-
rate, and things are back in the slough of a hundred years
ago. The situation is now complicated in the extreme on
account of the refusal of the Irish to join the Army, and the
refusal on this side of what used to be called Liberalism to
stand for the principle of Home Rule. With the break of
that principle — which incidentally, though it is not yet recog-
nised here, destroyed Liberalism — Ireland, too, has broken
into conditions of chaos and sulky negativism, in- which the
only live thing seems to be the record of martyrs as they are
made individually and collectively by the policy of Ulster
Protestant ascendancy.
The position to-day is the return to the Battle of the
Boyne attitude of Pitt and Castlereagh, or the triumph of
Sir E. Carson. As we know the entire Irish Executive
have been removed; the Chief Secretary, the Commander
of the Forces, and the Lord Chancellor : the whole Catholic
personnel. Its character is revealed at once when we see
that the new Lord Chancellor of Ireland is Sir James Camp-
bell, well known in Ireland as the " Legal Assessor" to the
Ulster Provisional Government in 19 14, a self-declared
rebel. He said at Swansea, on March 13th, 19 14 :" Civil war
was the path of danger, but it was also the path of duty ; and
he was convinced that no other alternative was left to the
Loyalists of Ulster. Thus we find the Legal Assessor of
Ulster rebellion to-day Lord Chancellor of Ireland.
The next outstanding fact is the plot, the evidence of
which the Prime Minister has declared no " taunts " will
THE TRAGEDY OF IRELAND 141
drive the Government to produee. Here we swallow it all,
because it is Irish and we have real cause to be angry ; but
here, again, there is grave matter for thought. No less a
man than Lord Wimborne, late Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland,
said in the House of Lords (June 20th) : " It is somewhat
strange, in view of the highly specialised means of obtaining
information which Rave recently existed in Ireland, that
neither I , nor, as far as I am aware, any other member of the
late Irish Executive, was aware of the existence of this plot
until it was discovered by the British Government^
No reasonable man can fail to be struck by these words,
uttered by an official who was in the best position to have all
the facts at his disposal and yet knew nothing. We cannot
pass over this evidence. Lord Wimborne has not even a
German aunt to whip him with ; he is an Englishman, and he
states that the Executive know nothing about this plot, and
at the same time Mr. Lloyd George refuses to publish the
evidence which all England would rejoice to read. What
does this mean?
If the Government possess evidence of actual treason
clearly it is their duty to produce it and to enforce
the penalty. In war treason cannot be played with.
If the Sinn Fein leaders are guilty of treason nothing would
justify our coercion policy so easily before the world as the
proof of their guilt. Why is this secrecy pursued? Over
200 Irishmen have been arrested on this charge ; not one has
been tried ; no evidence has been produced, and the late Irish
Executive confess to complete ignorance of the conspiracy.
This is all the more extraordinary because nothing would
justify Protestant Ulster's attitude more intelligently than
the clear proof of Catholic Irish treason. Yet Ulster is
denied this satisfaction. It becomes a "taunt" to ask for
proof. Treason has been committed, yet no man is to hang.
.Why? How is it Sir E. Carson does not insist upon the
publication of guilt? The merest proof would vindicate
him and Ulster to the hilt. It is refused. This is hard on
Ulster. There is surely no lack of hemp. Where is the
" hidden hand " that protects these traitors ?
Now, only the other day, the Prime Minister was assuring
us that he staked all on the Convention which failed because
Ulster blocked all progress all the time. And, when that expe-
dient had failed — failed simply because Ulster intended it to
fail — Mr. Lloyd George made an impassioned speech and
announced his policy of conscription, plus an airy promise to
142 THE ENGLISH REVIEW
bring in a Home Rule Bill, though there was no connection,
he hastened to declare^ between the two policies. More, the
Prime Minister told us he would stand no nonsense. He
really seemed at last to have an Irish policy, and Ulster was
delighted. That was in April — before the Sinn Fein plot
had been discovered, so that Mr. Lloyd George had pro-
mised to introduce a Home Rule Bill before the plot had
been discovered, which led to -the arrest of the Sinn Fein
leaders, with its inevitable consequence, the dropping of the
Home Rule promise. Then, again, we have a change.
With the establishment of an ascendancy regime, conscrip-
tion and Home Rule are dropped, and there is the case of
the man Dowling, landed from a submarine. But here,
again, we have a mystery. This man was landed almost
a week before the Home Rule Bill was announced in Parlia-
ment, so that the question arises as to the connection of this
man with the plot and, if so, why in the circumstances was
Home Rule proceeded with ? There is still no explanation.
We do not know. All that we do know is that Sir E. Carson
celebrated the 12th of July in Belfast with a carnival of drum-
beating, according to the tradition, apparently adopting the
Sinn Fein motto of reliance " upon ourselves " — and that is
all. Lord Wimborne's indictment remains unanswered. The
' traitors " remain unhung, one of them in the interval
having been elected to Parliament. The Convention is
dropped. Conscription is dropped. Home Rule is dropped.
Ireland is made practically a barred zone. Our Press says
nothing. We have returned to the methods of Castlereagh,
which consisted in pitting Protestant against Catholic, per-
haps the only point of humour in the whole dreary business
being Mr. Lloyd George's twit that the Irish hadn't a
language, even while the police are forbidding the Irish to
try to sing songs in their own tongue. In Ireland the situa-
tion is anarchy. Sir E. Carson, who never goes to his con-
stituency in Dublin, has won all along the line.
Can this condition last? Indefinitely, no. If volun-
teers do not come forward, the position will grow worse until
the point of enforcing conscription is reached, and when that
crisis arises we shall be faced with catastrophe. Even the
Government must be aware of that. But will a catastrophe
clear the air? All the lessons of history point to the con-
trary. Ireland is our test of sincerity or statesmanship, and
Ireland cannot be solved on the lines of coercion. We
may drift into the attempt, and probably we shall be com-
THE TRAGEDY OF IRELAND 143
pelled to; many men here openly say the sooner the better.
Yet that is simply because they have never studied the Irish
problem, have never been to Ireland, and look upon the whole
matter as a standing nuisance. It is the great difficulty in
the default of Liberalism. When Mr. Asquith in 19 14
yielded to Ulster insistency and refused to put in force the
law of the land, he laid the foundations of the trouble which
led to Sinn Fein. He undermined the logic of the Irish
Nationalist Party, and smashed Liberalism here. This de-
fection left us without balance, so opening the floodgates of
religious partisanship and neutralising the policy of the last
thirty years. Since then he has failed to challenge Mr.
Lloyd George's opportunism, and so to-day there is no prin-
ciple and, consequently, no policy. Ireland has slipped
back into the morass of sullen opposition of the Union period
because we failed to govern on any principle and, alterna-
tively, failed to allow her self-government. The policy
which in 19 14 started out with the Press advertisements:
' Only Protestants and Unionists eligible " for the army,
thereby antagonising the Catholic Irish, has drifted into the
negation of policy, that is, military rule.
Now this war is being fought for a great world principle,
and its control has passed absolutely to America. That is the
truth we must, if only in our own interests, face. Sooner or later
we shall be brought up against the sincerity of our own ideals,
the acid test of which lies directly in Ireland. That problem
can only be solved by sincerity. It can never be solved by
setting up a Minority Government based upon religious pre-
ference, still less can it be solved by the dodges and tactics of
politicians. We have tried the dodges and tactics for six
hundred years. Over a hundred years ago the Protestants
and Catholics of Ireland had become friends ; they were de-
liberately split and reantagonised by the policy of Pitt and
Castlereagh. That is the position again at this hour. The
Orange Society, which was founded in 1795, once more
governs, ensconced in the tradition of what is to-day styled
Unionism.
The rebels of 19 14 are thus our masters and the masters of
Ireland; but for them Sinn Fein would never have been heard
of. That is the brutal truth. We can continue to drift until
we reach catastrophe, if we so desire, but it will be a cata-
strophe of the gravest Imperial consequence. For it will
strike at the root principle of our Imperial attachments, and
it will clash with the ideals and sanction of America.
The War Office and Mr. H. A. (Barker
By Austin Harrison
The case of the celebrated bonesetter, Mr. H. A. Barker, has
reached a point which is not only ridiculous but positively
humiliating to the national sense. For many years Mr. Barker
has practised until to-day his fame is a byword, and at his
house one can meet a procession of patients, admirals,
generals, peers, M.P.'s etc. — and doctors; and the cures he
effects are literally the astonishment of the medical faculty.
So much is admitted. Many distinguished surgeons have
seen him operate and recognise his genius. In the profes-
sion (European and American), manipulative surgery is now
acknowledged to be an important development of surgery;
indeed, there is little opposition to this science or art
for the simple reason that so many men and women
are walking about whole who failed to get cured in the
hands of the profession and the specialist. Mr. Barker, then, is
accepted as a scientist. The suffering public regard him as a
wonder-worker. In short, any sensible man who suffers from
a displaced cartilage, to cite one instance, goes automatically
to Barker, who performs his astonishing forty-seconds
operation, which, incidentally, no other practitioner in the
country can do; for surgeons can only attempt to bring
about the desired result by an operation with the aid of the
knife, which means weeks of disablement, and sometimes a
stiff joint for life.
Mr. Barker is thus a bloodless surgeon. He manipulates.
His science is essentially personal; it is therefore an art; now
because it is an art, a rebel or unaccredited development,
there is a difficulty.
Let me explain exactly what is meant by this definition
of art. Six months ago I came in touch with a major who had
been wounded in 19 14 and had suffered increasing pain ever
since. His arm had shrunk. Shooting pains through the
shoulder and back prevented him from sleeping ; for two years
he had been discharged, and when I first saw him he was in a
very low physical and mental condition. In addition to the
army surgeons, three specialists had treated him, but in vain;
the pain had increased; he spoke ..to me of suicide.
I suggested Mr. Barker; and then for two months we did
THE WAR OFFICE AND MR. H. A. BARKER 145
not meet. The next time I saw him he was worse ; thin, pale,
neurasthenic. This time I gave him a letter of introduction.
Yet still he hesitated — a " bonesetter," he said, " well, I'm
going to see Sir , and if he can't do me any good,
I'll go."
Two months later I again met him ; he was fatter, robust,
all smiles.
" I'm cured," he told me. " I walked out of Barker's
room for the first time without pain for two and a half years."
A few weeks afterwards he was playing tennis. Mr.
Barker, when questioned, told me it was a simple trouble —
a tendon displacement.
Here is a case, one of the many, where Mr. Barker's know-
ledge and manipulative address constitute at once a science
and an art, because the science alone would not be sufficient,
except for diagnosis, the cure being effected by his remark-
able tactual skill; which, of course, is a personal faculty,
not necessarily acquirable or even communicable. And this
is the difficulty — the artist-healer never went through the
schools.
Because he has not passed the ordinary medical examina-
tions he is banned. He cannot put up a plate. He is barred
by the profession, who have outrageously attacked him. And
his anaesthetist has been struck off the medical rolls for assist-
ing a man who is not technically entitled to practise.
Such is the position. On principle, the faculty have a
case, but — and this is the real question — the faculty are sup-
posed to be scientific, and, consequently, they know that
science never stands still. In standing upon a technicality
they are, in Mr. Barker's case, deliberately opposing progress.
For the sake of a provision rightly legalised in the interests
of science, they are refusing science ; they are placing a re-
striction upon the development of knowledge ; they are acting
exactly as the Church acted in the case of Galileo.
Their position has been defined again and again, and
always it comes down to the simple point : Mr. Barker has
not passed his examinations ; ergo, Mr. Barker is to be banned.
Now here the profession are challenging their own scientific
faith. When they say Mr. Barker must pass his examina-
tions before " we accredit " him, they are thinking of law, not
of science. No surgeon could examine Mr. Barker in the
manipulation of the human body — -which is the only
side of surgery he practises in — because no surgeon is in the
same class as Barker with regard to tactual or manipulative
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146 THE ENGLISH REVIEW
technique, because surgery has been hitherto a question of the
knife.
To ban Barker because he has not been through his
course of examinations, studied midwifery, lockjaw, the
inoculations of streptococci, pyorrhoea, gastritis, etc., and so
prepared himself to be an all-round practitioner, whereas he
has nothing to do with the prescription or preparation of medi-
cines, nothing to do with fevers, nothing to do with the " flu,"
or appendicitis, or the now fashionable colitis, with the heart
or the stomach or the liver, or bacteriology, or 606, and
nothing to do with the knife, is to say that no man shall be
allowed to further medical science — that is, to assist humanity
— unless he happens to have spent seven years as a student
passing the ordinary examinations which do not touch upon
Mr. Barker's highly specialised technique, either medically or
clinically. It comes to this. The ban upon Barker is a defiance
of science. It means that if a man arose who could cure con-
sumption by massage, he would be denounced as a fraud
unless he had passed his examinations; or if a man, not a
qualified doctor, discovered a serum which cured cancer or
parasyphilis, or discovered the origins of life, or found a
remedy for arterial decay, he would have to be banned, no
matter how many cancerous people got cured — which is to
say that human disease is the monopoly of a profession, which
obviously is the negation of science. It is all the more
anomalous to-day, because the chief progress made of late
years in medical science has come from bacteriologists
who are chemists, precisely as Barker is a chemist of
the bone.
Now the truth is that to-day many doctors have begun
to study elementary physio-therapy. The Swedish masseurs
have broken down the old-fashioned prejudice against mani-
pulation, so that in those pleasant homes of rest and milk
diet where women specialists send their nerve and neurotic
patients to-day there is generally a mild course of massage,
which, as a friend who went through a cure described it to
me, is quite the j oiliest thing there. Most doctors know that
Mr. Barker can do things they do not even pretend to under-
stand. Some go to him and get cured. A few of them
actually send patients to him. In conversation they admit
Barker's genius, only " the fellow hasn't passed his examina-
tions." Such is the quandary.
I submit that it is time the profession adopted a scientific
THE WAR OFFICE AND MR. H. A. BARKER 147
attitude and conferred upon Mr. Barker an honorary degree.
Thousands of soldiers are walking about maimed, crippled,
half men, many of whom Mr. Barker could make whole men.
Yet he is not allowed to. The War Office, while withdrawing
the ban on bonesetting as such, have still not recognised Mr.
Barker specifically, no doubt acting upon the advice of the
profession, although Mr. Barker has offered to place his ser-
vices at the disposal of the War Office for nothing. Can
anything be more foolish than this negative recognition. It
is also a real danger, because now any man can put up a plate
with results that may be anything but advantageous. And
yet the matter is so simple. The only difficulty is the techni-
cality, which in Barker's ,case is an acknowledged absurdity,
for I doubt whether any surgeon would venture to examine
him on the technique of bonesetting; but this difficulty could
be disposed of at once by specific recognition. Manipulative
surgery, of course, is a development or extension of surgery
which the profession hitherto have paid only slight attention to.
It has, therefore, passed beyond their ken into the hands of a
few men who have themselves passed beyond the standard of
the ordinary examinations and are thus in the absurd position
of scientific outlaws. Their skill is not disputed ; only because
these men have not emerged from within the faculty they are
banned in the absence of a diploma.
The public on the other hand do not care one whit for the
medical ban. They go to Barker because he cures them.
Surely this paradox cannot be allowed to continue.
If it does continue, the profession will expose themselves
to the suspicion that they do not care for science or humanity
because they are thinking chiefly of the profession ; and that
would be a very unfortunate position for them to accept.
Scientifically, they cannot accept it; their duty primarily is
to the public. Their conscience to-day clearly forces them to
a change of attitude towards the accepted leading manipula-
tive surgeon in this country.
Because, actually and scientifically, they do accept Mr.
Barker. When, therefore, a doctor writes to the papers to
point out the technical flaw in Mr. Barker's equipment, he,
ipso facto, rules himself out as a scientific man. He implies
that, no matter how great Mr. Barker's knowledge is, and, no
matter how much human suffering he can alleviate, he must
be banned not for a scientific reason but for a technical one.
Such a doctor is, consequently, frustrating the progress of his
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148 THE ENGLISH REVIEW
own noble profession, and frustrating the public from
deriving proper advantage from such progress, and in this
he is serving neither science nor humanity.
A growing number of doctors and . surgeons feel this
acutely. I submit, then, in the interests of the many soldiers
whom Mr. Barker could restore to full health and condition,
that the General Medical Council should recognise Mr.
Barker's quite personal genius and eschew the technical
difficulty by conferring an honorary degree upon him, so that
the War Office could avail themselves of Mr. Barker's un-
rivalled services. So much is clearly demanded to-day by
enlightened public opinion. So much is clearly demanded
of the profession in the interests of their own scientific posi-
tion. We make pushing M.P.'s brigadier-generals. The
Universities confer honorary degrees on successful public
men. To-day the agony of hundreds of maimed soldiers
cries to the Medical Council to take the simple and neces-
sary step.
If the Council refuses it will have to face the stigma in-
separable from an attitude which is demonstrably and
admittedly unscientific.
A Tax on Books
By Austin Harrison
At this hour of agony, when the whole world is searching for
a return to reason, an avenue of escape, some flame of inspira-
tion, our " business " Government propose or threaten a tax
on books. It is characteristic of our time, a tribute to the
mania of war. Each year of it has marked a declension of
mind and of the values of the mind. To-day, as we enter
the fifth year, the proposal to tax the intellect seems almost
a fitting work of legislation ; for what, indeed, are books in war
but a — luxury !
In the grand Elizabethan age we thought as well as we
fought, but this is a financial epoch, and, as the financiers now
say, finance is a myth. " Strength," Shakespeare wrote, " is
lord of imbecility " ; no man would assert as much to-day.
We suggest a tax on books because we have come to despise
books. They are a trade. And this strange thing we do even
as publishers announce translations of the strategic, works
of Clausewitz and Foch, seeing that we have no classics of
that kind of our own. Have we here a clue, or is it, like credit,
another myth? Are we, that is, dissociating energy from
mind and, if so, what do we imagine is likely to be the quality
of that energy ?
Only the other day the cry went forth — education. We
had made a discovery. The man denounced in his time as a
Philistine, Matthew Arnold, had been proved a prophet; we
were to get us a " new world," and for that purpose we were
to have a higher education. For a while the cry was quite a
display. A student of Napoleon became Minister of
Education and he set to work on a Bill. It came and fizzled.
To-day it seems almost as much in need of help as the derelict
Ministry of Health. We began at the wrong end.
Books recently written had placed the finger on the sore,
and rightly they referred to the head, the primary or public
150 THE ENGLISH REVIEW
schools, rightly because obviously it is from these schools
that the leaders of men come — the example of democracy —
and equally obviously, if these men fail, inevitably the masses
must fail. All these books on these schools fastened on the
central weakness as a training which did not cultivate the zest
for knowledge. It was not the specific education that failed,
but the direction of and the enthusiasm for education. Ad-
mittedly this has been the case with the Army. Admittedly
it is the schools which fail to stimulate the desire for know-
ledge and culture, where the reformer's knife was first needed.
It is not to be. These schools which have no specified
standards, which are personal and competitive, are to con-
tinue unreformed. Only quite low down is there to be a
higher standard. Matthew Arnold need not try to turn over
and wave a flag. On the contrary his books may be taxed.
The truth is, of course, that never in the history of this
country are intelligence and knowledge so much needed as at
this hour, when politics threaten to become neurasthenics, and
in the " call of the blood " the unthoughtf ul or lower values
of the community rise automatically to the surface in line with
the public neurosis. In the phenomena of our Billings and
Belshers, sensationalism and rowdyism, our Protestant Ulster
reformation, our Propaganda Press, our unknown Ministries,
and our orgy of wages as you like and profits as you can, we
can descry a disruptive process which has all the elements
of anarchy, all the more in that it is not controlled by Govern-
ment but is becoming more and more the platform for all
Government. With the proposal to tax books we find a pro-
posal to set up a Government News Agency or master mind
of the Press. To anyone who can realise anything, that means
nothing more or less than the policing of the mind and its
expression.
The talk — it has not yet become a " stunt " — of the hour is
what has been styled "A League of Nations," in regard to
which the attention of readers is directed to the essay by Mr.
H. N. Brailsford, to whom our prize award has fallen out of
over 250 essays that were sent in. I do not know whether an
apology is needed, for clearly this is a matter of the intelli-
gence, which only can attain to reality through the intel-
ligence. It may thus be " suspect " matter. Yet Mr. Wilson
is reputed to stand for it, and he controls. If so, then it is to
A TAX ON BOOKS 151
be hoped our " masters " will deign to consider this essay, will
not dismiss it as — luxury. I should like to say this about our
competition.
That it aroused interest is clear. But there is more than
that. The response was curiously wide, essays being sent in
from all parts of the country ; from women, from the Univer-
sities ; and all agreed in the view that at last something must
be done to bring about a new ethic of State, national and inter-
national. The main things aimed at were : (1) The abolition
of secret diplomacy; (2) The limitation of armaments; (3)
The internationalisation of coloured peoples and their terri-
tories; (4) A higher definition of the spiritual force of Im-
perialism ; (5) A truer democratic control ; (6) A clearer un-
derstanding of national and international right. But these
great reforms cannot be carried out by sensation. Here the
police are no good. Neither the censor nor the politician
can tackle problems such as these. For as force breeds force,
so only can spirituality be born through spirituality. Tax
books, and we will go back ; we cannot advance through the
abdication of mind. Control or police the Press, and creative
thought must cease and with it all hope of progress. If only
our " masters " are to pronounce, men conspicuous for their
failures in almost every sphere of thought and administration,
the results must be second rate, must therefore ultimately be
ephemeral, for finally it is the mind which is the creator. How
then are we to reform the world if books are a luxury and
our Press is to become the mere reflex of the control ? Al-
ready our Press has abdicated. It cannot go lower without
forfeiting all responsibility and independence. On the other
hand, until it recovers both it cannot lead, because without
freedom it is shorn of both proportion and intelligence.
As an example of this, consider the story recently pub-
lished about a U-boat commander who, when taken off
declared that the boat was empty, and then, hearing tapping,
our sailors found in the submarine, which was about to be
sunk, some British prisoners tied together thus diabolically
consigned to death. All the papers published this story. It
was believed, and excited just execration. But now we learn
in the House that the Admiralty know nothing about the tale ;
no such report was received. Now few papers published the
denfal and consequently few people know that it was a pure
152 THE ENGLISH REVIEW
invention. What are we to say to this ? What is the Censor
for? Is he there only to suppress facts? This sort of thing
infuriates the people, it does immense harm abroad; it still
further fosters hate. The question is legitimate : Is this pro-
paganda? If so, who controls the propaganda? This is
certainly no way to bring about a League of
Nations. It is a sign of weakness. Democracy ought in
its own interests to preserve the semblance of dignity; this,
like the Kadaver story, discredits us as a nation. Now had
we a freer Press such things could not be done. Imagine
what stories we shall be told if our Press is completely .con-
trolled ! Controlled by men we do not know : who work in
the dark absolutely without responsibility; who can set up
currents of emotion unchecked and undetected; in short,
who control our very smiles.
It is a prospect which no sane man can contemplate with-
out a shudder. If books are taxed we only have the Press
left to us, but if the Press too is to be treated as a " luxury,"
then imbecility will be the lord of strength. And imbecility
will prove a Bolshevist — or negativist. The strange thing
is that never since the war started has the all-round situation
military and moral been so clearly indicated or our sacrifice
been so amply rewarded. We have " come through." We
have fulfilled our destiny in its now definite association with
the New World. We have but to summon to our councils
the freedom of the mind to set Europe and the world free.
Not books should be taxed, but stupidity. Not thought
should be discouraged, but the absence of thought. Our
strength, as a civilisation, ultimately must be our mind, and
so much we have acknowledged in our acceptance of the
challenge of force. Why then deny the moving spirit of that
inspiration? It is a deflection, of course, but deflections are
the danger in war. Fury is no substitute; fury was the Ger-
man madness. It led them, we now know, into a monomania,
back into the concepts of medievalism. That it struck
against us was our justification. Had we not accepted the
challenge, the world would have been thrown back a
hundred years ; but already it has advanced a hundred years.
We can say that with just pride. Yet more is needed. We
have to prove it, yet first we must prove ourselves. That is
a problem of leadership, of mind, of sincerity. For that test,
A TAX ON BOOKS 153
the supreme test, we shall need all the help we can raise,
otherwise there will be no whole-work. Only a torso will
result, a non-spiritual result. But if we open the floodgates
of the mind, that victory also will be achieved.
So far we cannot pretend to have evolved much new
thought. There is the cry — the land for the people, yet no one
seems to have reckoned with that peculiar English problem —
the weather, which controls both the land and the farmers. If
finance is a myth, wages are not, yet wages rise month by
month to meet the rising prices, and the war has become a
business. Afterwards — what? Is anybody thinking of the
law of the market in its relation to wages, or is the true alter-
native Socialism ? And then ? These are matters which de-
mand our serious attention, for if the solution of modern war
is orgy, the solution of orgy is anarchy. Our masters,
what will they do then, if they are caught " unprepared " ?
Is any man thinking? I doubt it. We are bidden not — we
may soon be forbidden — to think. The movement is all, the
mind is nothing. In this formula we accept, as it were,
fatalism ; which is to say we have no objective. It is the spirit
which would tax books and thus eliminate creation. This
New World, what will it be without creation? In what way
will it differ from the Old World, except in the multiplicity
of its complications? Is the solution internationalism — -
Labour? Or is it a League of Nations? Taxing books will
certainly not help us to think. Our law is acquiescence. Our
fate may lie in the fortuity of a general election, or mere pro-
paganda. In all this the intelligence of the country seems
to have neither voice nor vocation.
The failure of the German offensive — which, if it had suc-
ceeded, would unquestionably have set up a very critical situa-
tion and one of great strategic disadvantage to our arms —
may already be described as an aggressive frustration. All
depended upon it for the Germans. Kuhlmann had been
dismissed in anticipation of its success; the Pan-Germans
had once more got " into the saddle " ; but it has failed,
thanks to General Foch, and once more the Marne has proved
the graveyard of German ambitions. Though it is too early
yet to assume that its political effects will become manifest
in the immediate future, they will do so. Following on the
Piave disaster of the Austrians, this abortive offensive on the
154 THE ENGLISH REVIEW
Marne implies military failure at the critical month in the
critical year of the war, and unless the Germans can recover
the strategic initiative and once more obtain an offensive
momentum, their hour of fortune will have passed against the
rising tide of the American forces who will pour in during
the winter. Not that the battles of this year are by . any
means over, or that the Germans are not likely to hit us
exceedingly hard in the still critical months left to them. But
— and that is the real point — their third grand attack was con-
ceived and timed for a decision, and it was the last German
chance. The decision has fallen to us ; it may yet prove the
needful correction of the war.
If they cannot wrest the initiative from General Foch
again, inevitably they will henceforth be thrown on the
defensive, and they will perforce realise it. Now that means
the admission of failure. It need not end the war, and
probably will not; indeed, it may prolong the war, for on
the defensive the Germans will prove enormously strong, if
we in our turn assume the purely physical role. The
Americans in the recent battles have exceeded all expecta-
tions; the Marne will establish the American moral. At this
juncture moral is of tremendous importance. No doubt the
Germans will make a terrific effort to win back the balance
and spirit of attack, but one more failure and they will have
definitively failed offensively. That is the new military posi-
tion, snatched from the enemy by sound generalship and the
weight of " Young " America. The lesson will not be lost in
Germany. Will it be grasped here ?
At such a moment to tax books and still further politicise
the Press would seem the pitch of folly. Now it is that we shall
need our wise men, our mind, all that we can gather together
that is big and inherent of our dfvilisation. Now it is that we
must show to the world that the true strength is mind, and
that in the issue of construction and responsibility we lead,
as we led at the call in 19 14.
NOTICE.
The essay by Mr. George Aitken, which was a very close
second in our prize competition, will be published in the
September issue.
Colour in Salonica
By Louis Golding
Most of all I mourn Salonica as the Palette of the
World.
The orchestra that played every amazing symphony of
colour in the streets and under the shadow of the ramparts,
is now fallen to silence; the preludes of pink shrilling into
Scarlet, the sudden tuckets from without of unpremeditated
orange, the bassoon-notes of ponderous purple, all have
faded into a desolation of cinders and dissipated into clouds
of homeless dust.
Olympus beyond the shimmering JEgesm still sets the
keynote of colour, but there is no city beyond the bay to
respond to his dawning splendours. Though no colour may
even tint the thunderous snows of his forehead, still the
dawn places garments of opal round his illimitable shoulders.
Still as the morning broadens into noon, his white splendours
rise against the intense and intenser blue. Then as noon
slips quiveringly into dusk shadows of violet rise from the
chasms of Olympus. But no shadow of violet rises from
the archways, trembles from under the gables of the city
beyond the bay. Still when sunset is hurrying fires to the
nightly extinction of the earth, flickers of flame reach out-
wards from the molten core of Olympus, where the gods
are gathered against the modern desecration, and await that
moment of ultimate freedom when all the creeds shall be
dead. But no rivulets of sunset fire lap the banks of ashen
desolation in the city beyond the bay. All day in Salonica
it is now night.
It is only to a makeshift harbour that the fishing-boats
come in — fishing-boats which were seen literally to undergo
the transformation for which Elroy Flecker watched in
vain —
"To see the mast burst open with a rose,
And the whole deck put on its leaves again."
Sometimes the harbour was encrusted with their gemmy
sails as the breast of a woman with topaz and ruby. Some-
times the seagulls settled on the water and became fishing-
156 THE ENGLISH REVIEW
boats, while the boats took wing and became seagulls. But
the place of their homing is burned away now, and their
colours wilt in the sun.
Perhaps it is as well ! Modern Salonica was a city of
corruption, a city of innuendoes, a city not of colour but of
tint, of reluctant vibrations of semi-tones. The decadence
of Eastern and Western Europe gathered here and found
a congenial home. The cocottes sitting in the cafes, their
green eyes half-opened, their carmine lips set in a patient
and significant smile, had lost all the adventurousness of
Paris and the rotund complacency of Vienna. The mauve
and olive-green and lemon-yellow in their costumes played
a vague tune in the treble, and supporting them in the bass
were horizon-blue, clay-khaki, Bersaglieri-green, in the uni-
forms of the officers. As they sat at the little tables of the
Jardins de -la Tour Blanche the sea came talking in among
the caiques, sucking round the prows of orange-flaming or
fish-silver boats, the sea came winking innumerable eyes and
saying : " We have heard it before, we have heard it before
— we shall hear it again, again, again ! "
Salonica at the sea's edge was a city of innuendo.
Salonica under the shadow of the old walls was a city of
brass-blaring assertion. In the Tour Blanche was only time-
weariness, the lapping murmurs of effete senility. At the
awning-shaded Turkish cafe outside the gate in the wall was
the childishness and crudity of the Middle Age. Here under
the indigo cypresses they gathered for drink and dance,
scarlet-trousered Turk, pearl-kirtled Albanian, rainbow-
striped Vlach. There was no sea here to temper the un-
mitigated blue in the sky. The flowers in the dry valleys
below had been shrivelled up after one week of the sun. But
in the veins of the dancers the Samos wine ran like fire ; even
the faithful drank raki to wash down their powdery cubes
of Turkish delight. When the sun began to sway towards
Olympus the be-fezzed caps of the musicians gathered to-
gether to dance over the tattoo of their barbaric drums.
The immemorial hostility of Turk and Bulgar and Greek
died a death of strangulation as the dancers seized each other
round the neck and tried to keep time to ten fantastic in-
struments shrieking aloud with no sense of cohesion. Like
a shadow behind the blaze, an upright Greek priest sat under
the awning, his beard flowing upon his gabardine, a torrent
of ebony. Here and there among bays in the wall, undis-
tinguishable from stones fallen three centuries ago, the
COLOUR IN SALONICA 157
women, swathed round with trousers, sat in heaps; undis-
tinguishable excepting that they moved in a sort of rhythm
as they scratched their limbs unceasingly.
Away far in the valleys, away far towards Zeitenlik, a
little moving cloud of yellow dust! The guns are moving
up towards Monastir ! Away far out to sea, a little moving
cloud of yellow dust ! The guns are coming in from Wool-
wich Arsenal !
The stupor of Macedonian drums fades to silence in the
unheard, unescapable, immanent sound of world-guns
booming.
Colour in Salonica is dead ! There is neither amethyst
nor pale green at Floca's nor blood-crimson under the feudal
cypresses. The Great Fire has shrivelled them to dust.
And yet this spring as I walked among the ashes in a
place where old stone had hidden old secrets for two
thousand years, where sun had never shone into that evil
street and wind had never blown, I saw a miracle, a miracle
that atoned for all the colour that has vanished for ever
from Salonica.
With the wind that came in from the north I saw a violet
growing.
Books
BIOGRAPHY
Captain H. Ball, V.C., D.S.O., M.C. By W. A. Biscoe and H. R.
Stannakd. Herbert Jenkins, Ltd. 6s. net.
Ball came out of that inexhaustible reservoir, the sons of the British
middle class, from which have poured hundreds, even thousands of adven-
turous spirits, who are content to face death every day on the off chance
of "downing" " a Boche flying man. These are of that type of fearless and
adventurous young spirits who before the war found vent for their
energies in the opening up of the Dark Continent, where they were busy
at the work of setting up stations on the fringes of Empire, clearing
roads through the African forests, and licking all manner of dark persons
into useful and partially civilised military policemen. Their number was
legion, and they died very fast, but they did not care very much about
that, and those of them who did survive were usually the fittest, and
not seldom grew into the most efficient of mankind.
Ball, if his kismet had spared him, might have been one of these
latter. Instead of pioneering anywhere from Calabar to Caffraria, he
took the chance that the worjd-war offered him, and, aided by his self-
taught mechanical knowledge, literally worked his way up to a commis-
sion in the Royal Flying Corps, where in an almost incredibly brief
period he, in the words of Major-General Trenchard, "became the most
■ daring, skilful, and successful pilot in the R.F.C.," and won the Victoria
Cross, the D.S.O., the M.C. — each with bars — and a hero's death. But
he was ever a boy who looked upon the deadly grapple in cloudland
as just a huge "rag." His short life — and O, what a life! — told in
delightfully naive language, is a veritable human document which should
be placed in the hands of every plucky, wholesome-minded lad in the
Empire.
ESSAYS AND GENERAL LITERATURE
A Novelist on Novels. By W. L. George. Collins, Sons, and Co.,
Ltd. 6s. net.
An entirely pleasant compilation this. Mr. George sets out to focus
the coming men in fiction, finds them, criticises them, and, incidentally,
criticises the public; though he omits the Irish school, and on the whole
there seems little to quarrel with. The author shines with a Gallic wit
and a Gallic logic, and has undoubtedly the universal sense, without
which criticism must remain in curling-papers, and he now writes a
good nervous English. He recognises his own progress, hence the
reflexions are mature, the judgments considered, so that this volume
is not only instructive but constructive. Clearly he is freeing himself
from the glamour of cubist literature and the freak commercialism of
the " set" that almost captured society before the war, perhaps because
he recognises that after the war men will demand real values again, and
that the day of the Tango is dead. Perhaps the best thing in the book
is the last chapter, but this is pessimistic. It deals with the effects of
capitalism on art, and here Mr. George reflects George Moore's verdict
that no more great books will be written. If the future belongs to
BOOKS 159
science and the State, inevitably literature will suffer, must tend to go
out ; and on this note Mr. George leaves us. Meanwhile we can console
ourselves.
FICTION
Little Miss Muffet. By Elizabeth Kirby. Duckworth. 6s.
Here is a new author, again the new woman — something at once very
young and very old. Clearly it is a confession. Obviously it records
the impressions of a provincial Miss who comes to London in search
of Life, and finds it rather different from the fairy stories, and by no
means the turmoil of romance dreamt of in country parsonages. But
this crusader is no ordinary type. She is a poetess, and has the spiritu-
ality of the artist. She is also outrageously innocent; the born lover.
And this is her quest-love. The novel is interesting. It is more than
that because it is essentially in the spirit of the times, that new spirit
which is leading women — for the first time — to search for truth. Only
men have done this hitherto. Now women have become realists. That
is the real interest of this cri de cceur. It is essentially that. In this
writer we may have another woman writer, for she shows considerable
critical power coupled with a genuine poetic sense. She is likely to
grow. Let us hope she will pursue her quest of life and blossom into
that maturity, the promise of which lies daintily etched in the pages of
Miss Muffet versus the Spider.
SOCIAL
Married Love. By Dr. Marie Stopes. Fifield. 5s. net.
The great revolution in woman's position and attitude is again shown
in this frank physiological statement about the sex relationship of man
and woman. Like all Dr. Stopes 's writing, it is clear, thoughtful,
penetrating, and undoubtedly is a scientific contribution towards a
subject which a decade ago would have been taboo, and denounced as
vicious and indecent. The author's point is the arrestation of the
Englishwoman's sex gratification, its cause and the remedy; and here
her analysis of the rhythm of woman's love movements has a positive
value. Hitherto it has been almost impossible to obtain information
owing to the traditions of secrecy imposed upon woman and the train-
ing forced upon the sex by the Church and by convention ; but Dr. Marie
Stopes breaks through this agelong superstition and demands that women
should claim gratification in marriage precisely as men claim it. Her
book opens up a wide field which cannot be discussed in a review. Our
advice is for women to read it, and for men to read it, for there is here
stated a real problem which is specifically English. It has arisen as the
result of Puritanism and that suppression which has led to the moral
subjection of women, hence to her atrophied development and to that
blasting hypocrisy of attitude towards sex against which women in
revolt are to-day mobilising.
WAR
In the Fourth Year. By H. G. Wells. Chatto and Windus.
3s. 6d.
In a brave little tome, Mr. Wells states the case for the League of
Nations, which all men who are capable of constructive thinking should
!6o THE ENGLISH REVIEW
read. It is a popular exposition and avoids technicalities, the author's
object rightly being the idea. Here he is under no delusions. He
realises that the idea presupposes a new ethic of the State and a new
statement of nationality, and so he lays down the law that to succeed,
the League of Nations must supersede Empire. This is the root problem,
and really little else, for once mankind had moved forward to that new
plane of thought the construction would follow by process of evolution.
But this is also the great difficulty. We ourselves are Imperialists — since
the days of Rhodes this has been our creed, and it led us into the Boer
War, into China, and started the European hunt for Colonies and raw
materials. All this Mr. Wells sees. But he omits an inherent feature
of it — finance. He says nothing about the real nature of modern Im-
perialism, which is essentially capitalistic. And the omission is serious
because it lies at the root of the whole question, whether of militarism or
policy. Perhaps the greatest problem of the war is South Africa. It
is so difficult because of finance, of the raw products, of the gold, etc. ;
it is only camouflage when we refer to it as a native problem. Mr.
Wells subscribes to the Labour solution of Africa — internationalism.
Now that signifies the reversal of the Imperialism of Rhodes and Kip-
ling, or Beit and Wernher, and that is the crux and crown of the issue.
This is a helpful and a clear-thinking book. The author does not fear
facing facts and drawing logical conclusions. Thus he emphatically
warns us that our retention of Gibraltar is an anachronism and a moral
offence, and most justly he warns us of the danger of militarising the
Black. We cannot too strongly recommend this work. We should
like it issued in a sixpenny edition.
Only Typewritten Manuscripts will be considered, and although every
precaution is taken, the Proprietors will not be responsible for the loss or
damage of the manuscripts that may be sent in for consideration; nor can
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COAL
ins
F
UEL is a prime necessity of industry
and commerce, and the scientific
utilisation of our coal supplies — which
are being drained at an alarming rate in
proportion to those of our rivals — is a sub-
ject which calls for serious consideration by
all concerned in the management of an
industrial or a commercial undertaking or
of a home.
To burn crude coal is unscientific and
criminally wasteful : to burn gas — its puri-
fied essence — with due economy ensures
all-round saving and is as beneficial to the
individual as to the nation.
Coal is in various ways essential to our
industrial supremacy : it is the mainstay of
our manufactures, and as an export assists
more than any other commodity in keeping
up the rate of exchange.
For posterity's sake, then, as well as for
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